Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I couldn’t imagine him chatting up cannibals in New Guinea, or scouring Anasazi campsites with a toothbrush, sifting through goat dung for pottery shards. But these, he said, were merely his daytime drudgeries. On weekends he was following his heart, selling shoes. “No!” I said. “Adidas,” he said. “Screw Adidas,” I said, “you should work for me, help me sell these new Japanese running shoes.” I handed him a Tiger flat, told him about my trip to Japan, my meeting with Onitsuka. He bent the shoe, examined the sole. Pretty cool, he said. He was intrigued, but no. “I’m getting married,” he said. “Not sure I can take on a new venture right now.” I didn’t take his rejection to heart. It was the first time I’d heard the word “no” in months. LIFE WAS GOOD. Life was grand. I even had a sort of girlfriend, though I didn’t have much time for her. I was happy, maybe as happy as I’d ever been, and happiness can be dangerous. It dulls the senses. Thus, I wasn’t prepared for that dreadful letter. It was from a high school wrestling coach in some benighted town back east, some little burg on Long Island called Valley Stream or Massapequa or Manhasset. I had to read it twice before I understood. The coach claimed that he was just back from Japan, where he’d met with top executives at Onitsuka, who’d anointed him their exclusive American distributor. Since he’d heard that I was selling Tigers, I was therefore poaching, and he ordered me—ordered me!—to stop. Heart pounding, I phoned my cousin, Doug Houser. He’d graduated from Stanford Law School and was now working at a respected firm in town. I asked him to look into this Mr. Manhasset, find out what he could, then back the guy off with a letter. “Saying what, exactly?” Cousin Houser asked. “That any attempt to interfere with Blue Ribbon will be met with swift legal reprisal,” I said. My “business” was two months old and I was embroiled in a legal battle? Served me right for daring to call myself happy. Next I sat down and dashed off a frantic letter to Onitsuka. Dear Sirs, I was very distressed to receive a letter this morning from a man in Manhasset, New York, who claims...?

• From The Case for God (2009)

  It was experienced most acutely in the sexual act, when our reasoning powers are swamped by passion, God is forgotten, and creatures revel shamelessly in one another. The specter of reason dragged down by the chaos of lawless sensation reflected the tragedy of Rome, source of order, law, and civilization, brought low by the barbarian tribes. Jewish exegetes had never seen the sin of Adam in this catastrophic light, and the Greek Christians, who were not affected by the barbarian scourge, have never accepted the doctrine of Original Sin. Born in grief and fear, this doctrine has left Western Christians with a difficult legacy that linked sexuality indissolubly with sin and helped to alienate men and women from their humanity. Even though the Greeks found his interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve far too literal, Augustine was no die-hard biblical literalist. He took science very seriously, and his “principle of accommodation” would dominate biblical interpretation in the West until well into the early modern period. God had, as it were, adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had first received it. 62 One of the psalms, for example, clearly reflects the ancient view, long outmoded by Augustine’s time, that there was a body of water above the earth that caused rainfall. 63 It would be absurd to interpret this text literally. God had simply accommodated the truths of revelation to the science of the day so that the people of Israel could understand it; today a text like this must be interpreted differently. Whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute. 64 And there must be no unseemly quarreling about the Bible. People who engaged in acrimonious discussion of religious truth were simply in love with their own opinions and had forgotten the cardinal teaching of the Bible, which was the love of God and neighbor. 65 The exegete must not leave a text until he could make it “establish the reign of charity,” and if a literal understanding of any biblical passage seemed to teach hatred, the text must be interpreted allegorically and forced to preach love. 66 Augustine had absorbed the underlying spirit of Greek apophatic theology, but the West did not develop a fully fledged spirituality of silence until the ninth century, when the writings of an unknown Greek author were translated into Latin and achieved near-canonical status in Europe. He used the pseudonym Denys the Areopagite, Saint Paul’s first Athenian convert, 67 but he was almost certainly writing toward the end of the fifth and the beginning of the sixth centuries.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  ©2004 The Teaching Company. 11 II. The vast majority of persons living in the Roman Empire were pagan, that is, polytheists who adhered to various local and state religions, or cults (“forms of worship”). A. The belief in many gods was seen as natural and obvious. 1. These included the “great gods,” known to us through ancient Greek and Roman mythology (Zeus, Apollo, Hera, and Aphrodite and their Roman equivalents). 2. They also included local gods who protected and cared for cities, towns, and villages; even less powerful gods who were localized in forests, rivers, and roads; and family gods who cared for the home. 3. The gods oversaw every human function and activity, including the crops, the cupboard, the hearth, personal health, childbirth, war, love, and most everything else. 4. The divine realm was seen, therefore, as a kind of pyramidal hierarchy, with the few great gods near the top and the less powerful but more immediately relevant gods near the bottom. B. Religion was not a matter of securing an afterlife but of honoring the gods who could protect and assist mortals in need. 1. The “fear of the gods” was a motivating factor in ancient religion. 2. These religions sought, therefore, the “peace of the gods” (pax deorum). C. The gods were worshipped principally through acts of prayer and, especially, sacrifice. 1. For the most part, this was a periodic affair, not a matter of constant devotion. 2. As a result, ethics was not, for the most part, a feature of these religions. 3. Nor, surprisingly enough for modern people, was correct doctrine central to these religious. There was no such thing as orthodoxy or heresy, right belief or wrong belief, in these religions. D. As a partial result, most of these religions were completely tolerant of one another (because there was no sense that only one of them could be “true”). 1. The state gods were expected to be worshipped by all. That only made sense, because these gods had made the state great.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  This is principally because the story is told in a way to emphasize the similarities of Polycarp’s death to the death of Jesus in many of its details. For example, Polycarp predicts his death, he is betrayed by one of his own, the officer opposed to him is named Herod, he rides into town ona donkey, and so on. C. Still, there is a historical kernel to this intriguing account, and it can be used to help us understand a bit more about why and how non-Christians opposed the followers of Christ in the early centuries of the church. 1. Zs The account stresses that others were tortured to death before Polycarp. It then goes on to detail the burning desire of the pagan crowds to have the leader of the Christians arrested and put on trial. The arresting officials try to persuade Polycarp to acknowledge the divinity of the Roman gods, but he refuses. When brought into the arena before the Roman proconsul, Polycarp is again urged to acknowledge the divinity of the emperor and to reject the “atheists” (that is, the Christians, who are “atheists” in that they do not accept the worship of the gods). When Polycarp steadfastly refuses, the proconsul urges him to persuade the masses. But Polycarp remains firm, despite threats of torture, because, as he says, the brief sufferings awaiting him pale in comparison with the eternal torments reserved for those who reject Christ. The crowds are incensed and urge his death. Polycarp is then burned at the stake. The narrator indicates that before his 179 death, God worked miracles to demonstrate the truth of the gospel and to validate Polycarp as a true witness to it. III. This account helps to illustrate several important historical facts about why the early Christians were persecuted. 180 A. The religion was not understood to be illegal per se. Polycarp could have been spared had he simply recanted (unlike other crimes, for which expressing regret does not relieve one from punishment). B. Persecutions occurred because the pagan mobs opposed the Christians. 1. Their opposition appears to be rooted in a fear of what the gods would do to communities that harbored their opponents (see 12:2). This coincides with other evidence from early sources, including the famous lines from the Christian apologist (“defender of the faith’) Tertullian: “They [the pagans] think the Christians the cause of every public disaster, of every affliction with which the people are visited. If the Tiber rises as high as the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over the fields, if the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is famine or pestilence, straightway the cry is, ‘Away with the Christians to the lion!*” (Apology 40). This position makes considerable sense when one remembers that pagans saw the gods as their helpers and defenders against disaster; in exchange for their protection, the gods were to be worshipped in proper ways.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Eusebius is an important source for most of our information about the first three centuries. He was writing soon after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, and Eusebius gives an account of Christianity up to his own day. One of the things most valuable about Eusebius is that he would sometimes quote documents, letters, and reports in his history of early Christianity. He wrote a ten-volume history of the early church. This letter, then, the letter from the churches of Lyons and Vienne is incorporated into his account totally, so that we can extract it, and see what these second- century Christians were saying, even though the writing, now, is preserved in a fourth-century source. The account of the persecution of the Christians in Lyons and Vienne begins by indicating that the driving force behind the persecution was none other than the devil, who inspired the mobs to oppose Christians, and to deprive them of their public privileges and civil rights. Let me read just the very beginning of this letter, so you get a bit of a sense of how it works. It begins by saying: “The servants of Christ at Vienne and Lyons in Gaul, to our brothers in Asia and Phrygia. The severity of our trials here, the unbridled fury of the heathen against God’s people, the untold sufferings of the blessed martyrs, we are incapable of describing in detail. Indeed, no pen could do them justice,” they say. “The adversary swooped upon us with all his might, giving us, now, foretaste of his advent, which, undoubtedly is imminent.” This is referring to the devil, who has started this persecution against the Christians, and according to these authors, this is showing that they are living at the end of time. Remember, in apocalyptic thought, Jews and Christians who were apocalypticists maintained that the world had been given over to evil forces who were going to increase in power until the end of this age, when literally, all hell would break out, before God would intervene to overthrow the forces of evil. These Christians living in Lyons and Vienne were sensing that this persecution that had happened was a sign that the end was near, so that the devil was pulling out all stops now, and that was an indication that his own demise was imminent. They went on to indicate the devil had left no stone unturned in his efforts to gain adherents, and to equip them to attack the servants of God. Then, they went on to tell exactly what happened in the cities against the Christians: “We were debarred from houses, baths, and the forum. They actually forbade any of us to be seen in any place whatsoever,” meaning that the local pagan townspeople forbade Christians to appear in public. “These charged into the fight, standing up to every kind of abuse [They are referring now to the Christians who were being persecuted] and 168

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I looked at Hayes. I looked back at Ito. I allowed myself to think: We might... just... get away with this. Then I realized that I hadn’t yet told him the bad part. “Be that as it may,” I said, “they did throw us out, Mr. Ito, they did, and the net-net is that I have no bank. And thus I have no money. And I need to make payroll. And I need to pay my other creditors. And if I can’t meet those obligations, I am out of business. Today. In

• From Educated (2018)

  I ran outside and saw Luke hobbling across the grass. He screamed for Mother, then collapsed. … The jeans on his left leg were gone, melted away. Parts of the leg were livid, red and bloody; others were bleached and dead. Papery ropes of skin wrapped delicately around his thigh and down his calf, like wax dripping from a cheap candle. … I dumped half the bottle between Luke’s twitching lips. … “Should I make you cold or make you hot?” I shouted. … I sprinted into the house and emptied [the garbage can] onto the linoleum … I helped Luke balance on one foot and lower his burned leg, now wrapped in black plastic, into the garbage can.

• From Educated (2018)

  Because I was now falling from the side of the bin and not the front, I hoped—I prayed—that I was falling toward the ground and not toward the trailer, which was at that moment a fury of grinding metal. I sank, seeing only blue sky, waiting to feel either the stab of sharp iron or the jolt of solid earth. My back struck iron: the trailer’s wall. My feet snapped over my head and I continued my graceless plunge to the ground. The first fall was seven or eight feet, the second perhaps ten. I was relieved to taste dirt. I lay on my back for fifteen seconds before the engine growled to silence and I heard Dad’s heavy step. “What happened?” he said, kneeling next to me. “I fell out,” I wheezed. The wind had been knocked out of me, and there was a powerful throbbing in my back, as if I’d been cut in two. “How’d you manage that?” Dad said. His tone was sympathetic but disappointed. I felt stupid. I should have been able to do it, I thought. It’s a simple thing. Dad examined the gash in my leg, which had been ripped wide as the spike had fallen away. It looked like a pothole; the tissue had simply sunk out of sight. Dad slipped out of his flannel shirt and pressed it to my leg. “Go on home,” he said. “Mother will stop the bleeding.” I limped through the pasture until Dad was out of sight, then collapsed in the tall wheatgrass. I was shaking, gulping mouthfuls of air that never made it to my lungs. I didn’t understand why I was crying. I was alive. I would be fine. The angels had done their part. So why couldn’t I stop trembling? I was light-headed when I crossed the last field and approached the house, but I burst through the back door, as I’d seen my brothers do, as Robert and Emma had done, shouting for Mother. When she saw the crimson footprints streaked across the linoleum, she fetched the homeopathic she used to treat hemorrhages and shock, called Rescue Remedy, and put twelve drops of the clear, tasteless liquid under my tongue. She rested her left hand lightly on the gash and crossed the fingers of her right. Her eyes closed. Click click click. “There’s no tetanus,” she said. “The wound will close. Eventually. But it’ll leave a nasty scar.” She turned me onto my stomach and examined the bruise—a patch of deep purple the size of a human head—that had formed a few inches above my hip. Again her fingers crossed and her eyes closed. Click click click. “You’ve damaged your kidney,” she said. “We’d better make a fresh batch of juniper and mullein flower.” —THE GASH BELOW MY knee had formed a scab—dark and shiny, a black river flowing through pink flesh—when I came to a decision.

• From Educated (2018)

  Mother said we should wait until morning, but Dad wanted to get home so he and the boys could scrap the next morning. “I can’t afford to lose any more work days,” he said. Mother’s eyes darkened with worry, but she said nothing. —I AWOKE WHEN THE CAR HIT the first utility pole. I’d been asleep on the floor under my sister’s feet, a blanket over my head. I tried to sit up but the car was shaking, lunging—it felt like it was coming apart—and Audrey fell on top of me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel and hear it. Another loud thud, a lurch, my mother screaming, “Tyler!” from the front seat, and a final violent jolt before everything stopped and silence set in. Several seconds passed in which nothing happened. Then I heard Audrey’s voice. She was calling our names one by one. Then she said, “Everyone’s here except Tara!” I tried to shout but my face was wedged under the seat, my cheek pressed to the floor. I struggled under Audrey’s weight as she shouted my name. Finally, I arched my back and pushed her off, then stuck my head out of the blanket and said, “Here.” I looked around. Tyler had twisted his upper body so that he was practically climbing into the backseat, his eyes bulging as he took in every cut, every bruise, every pair of wide eyes. I could see his face but it didn’t look like his face. Blood gushed from his mouth and down his shirt. I closed my eyes, trying to forget the twisted angles of his bloodstained teeth. When I opened them again, it was to check everyone else. Richard was holding his head, a hand over each ear like he was trying to block out a noise. Audrey’s nose was strangely hooked and blood was streaming from it down her arm. Luke was shaking but I couldn’t see any blood. I had a gash on my forearm from where the seat’s frame had caught hold of me. “Everyone all right?” My father’s voice. There was a general mumble. “There are power lines on the car,” Dad said. “Nobody gets out till they’ve shut them off.” His door opened, and for a moment I thought he’d been electrocuted, but then I saw he’d pitched himself far enough so that his body had never touched the car and the ground at the same time. I remember peering at him through my shattered window as he circled the car, his red cap pushed back so the brim reached upward, licking the air. He looked strangely boyish. He circled the car then stopped, crouching low, bringing his head level with the passenger seat. “Are you okay?” he said. Then he said it again. The third time he said it, his voice quivered. I leaned over the seat to see who he was talking to, and only then realized how serious the accident had been.

• From Educated (2018)

  It contained no greeting, no message whatsoever. Just a chapter from the Bible, from Matthew, with a single verse set apart in bold: O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? It froze my blood. Shawn called an hour later. His tone was casual, and we talked for twenty minutes about Peter, about how his lungs were developing. Then he said, in a calm, even voice, “I have a decision to make, and I’d like your advice.” “Sure.” “I can’t decide.” He paused, and I thought that perhaps the connection had failed. “Whether I should kill you myself, or hire an assassin.” There was a static-filled silence. “It might be cheaper to hire someone, when you figure in the cost of the flight.” I pretended I hadn’t understood, but this only made him aggressive. Now he was hurling insults, snarling. I tried to calm him but it was pointless. We were seeing each other at long last. I hung up on him but he called again, and again and again, each time repeating the same lines, that I should watch my back, that his assassin was coming for me. I called my parents. “He didn’t mean it,” Mother said. “Anyway, he doesn’t have that kind of money.” “Not the point,” I said. Dad wanted evidence. “You didn’t record the call?” he said. “How am I supposed to know if he was serious?” “He sounded like he did when he threatened me with the bloody knife,” I said. “Well, he wasn’t serious about that.” “Not the point,” I said again. The phone calls stopped, eventually, but not because of anything my parents did. They stopped when Shawn cut me out of his life. He wrote, telling me to stay away from his wife and child, and to stay the hell away from him. The email was long, a thousand words of accusation and bile, but by the end his tone was mournful. He said he loved his brothers, that they were the best men he knew. I loved you the best of all of them, he wrote, but you had a knife in my back all of this time. It had been years since I’d had a relationship with my brother, but the loss of it, even with months of foreknowledge, stunned me. My parents said he was justified in cutting me off. Dad said I was hysterical, that I’d thrown thoughtless accusations when it was obvious my memory couldn’t be trusted. Mother said my rage was a real threat and that Shawn had a right to protect his family. “Your anger that night,” she told me on the phone, meaning the night Shawn had killed Diego, “was twice as dangerous as Shawn has ever been.” Reality became fluid. The ground gave way beneath my feet, dragging me downward, spinning fast, like sand rushing through a hole in the bottom of the universe.

• From Educated (2018)

  After they’d been cleaned, my brother Tyler chose one and set it on a sheet of black plastic, which he folded over the rifle, sealing it with yards of silvery duct tape. Hoisting the bundle onto his shoulder, he carried it down the hill and dropped it next to the red railroad car. Then he began to dig. When the hole was wide and deep, he dropped the rifle into it, and I watched him cover it with dirt, his muscles swelling from the exertion, his jaw clenched. Soon after, Dad bought a machine to manufacture bullets from spent cartridges. Now we could last longer in a standoff, he said. I thought of my “head for the hills” bag, waiting in my bed, and of the rifle hidden near the railcar, and began to worry about the bullet-making machine. It was bulky and bolted to an iron workstation in the basement. If we were taken by surprise, I figured we wouldn’t have time to fetch it. I wondered if we should bury it, too, with the rifle. We kept on bottling peaches. I don’t remember how many days passed or how many jars we’d added to our stores before Dad told us more of the story. “Randy Weaver’s been shot,” Dad said, his voice thin and erratic. “He left the cabin to fetch his son’s body, and the Feds shot him.” I’d never seen my father cry, but now tears were dripping in a steady stream from his nose. He didn’t wipe them, just let them spill onto his shirt. “His wife heard the shot and ran to the window, holding their baby. Then came the second shot.” Mother was sitting with her arms folded, one hand across her chest, the other clamped over her mouth. I stared at our speckled linoleum while Dad told us how the baby had been lifted from its mother’s arms, its face smeared with her blood. Until that moment, some part of me had wanted the Feds to come, had craved the adventure. Now I felt real fear. I pictured my brothers crouching in the dark, their sweaty hands slipping down their rifles. I pictured Mother, tired and parched, drawing back away from the window. I pictured myself lying flat on the floor, still and silent, listening to the sharp chirp of crickets in the field. Then I saw Mother stand and reach for the kitchen tap. A white flash, the roar of gunfire, and she fell. I leapt to catch the baby. Dad never told us the end of the story. We didn’t have a TV or radio, so perhaps he never learned how it ended himself. The last thing I remember him saying about it was, “Next time, it could be us.” Those words would stay with me. I would hear their echo in the chirp of crickets, in the squish of peaches dropping into a glass jar, in the metallic chink of an SKS being cleaned.

• From Educated (2018)

  The trailer could hold between fifteen and twenty bins, or about forty thousand pounds of iron. I found Dad in the field, lighting a fire to burn the insulation from a tangle of copper wires. I told him the bin was ready, and he walked back with me and climbed into the loader. He waved at the trailer. “We’ll get more in if you settle the iron after it’s been dumped. Hop in.” I didn’t understand. He wanted to dump the bin with me in it? “I’ll climb up after you’ve dumped the load,” I said. “No, this’ll be faster,” Dad said. “I’ll pause when the bin’s level with the trailer wall so you can climb out. Then you can run along the wall and perch on top of the cab until the dump is finished.” I settled myself on a length of iron. Dad jammed the forks under the bin, then lifted me and the scrap and began driving, full throttle, toward the trailer’s head. I could barely hold on. On the last turn, the bucket swung with such force that a spike of iron was flung toward me. It pierced the inside of my leg, an inch below my knee, sliding into the tissue like a knife into warm butter. I tried to pull it out but the load had shifted, and it was partially buried. I heard the soft groaning of hydraulic pumps as the boom extended. The groaning stopped when the bin was level with the trailer. Dad was giving me time to climb onto the trailer wall but I was pinned. “I’m stuck!” I shouted, only the growl of the loader’s engine was too loud. I wondered if Dad would wait to dump the bin until he saw me sitting safely on the semi’s cab, but even as I wondered I knew he wouldn’t. Time was still stalking. The hydraulics groaned and the bin raised another eight feet. Dumping position. I shouted again, higher this time, then lower, trying to find a pitch that would pierce through the drone of the engine. The bin began its tilt, slowly at first, then quickly. I was pinned near the back. I wrapped my hands around the bin’s top wall, knowing this would give me a ledge to grasp when the bin was vertical. As the bin continued to pitch, the scrap at the front began to slide forward, bit by bit, a great iron glacier breaking apart. The spike was still embedded in my leg, dragging me downward. My grip had slipped and I’d begun to slide when the spike finally ripped from me and fell away, smashing into the trailer with a tremendous crash. I was now free, but falling. I flailed my arms, willing them to seize something that wasn’t plunging downward. My palm caught hold of the bin’s side wall, which was now nearly vertical. I pulled myself toward it and hoisted my body over its edge, then continued my fall.

• From Educated (2018)

  It was six in the morning and he’d been driving in silence for most of the night, piloting our station wagon through Arizona, Nevada and Utah. We were in Cornish, a farming town twenty miles south of Buck’s Peak, when the station wagon drifted over the center line into the other lane, then left the highway. The car jumped a ditch, smashed through two utility poles of thick cedar, and was finally brought to a stop only when it collided with a row-crop tractor. —THE TRIP HAD BEEN Mother’s idea. A few months earlier, when crisp leaves had begun slipping to the ground, signaling the end of summer, Dad had been in high spirits. His feet tapped show tunes at breakfast, and during dinner he often pointed at the mountain, his eyes shining, and described where he would lay the pipes to bring water down to the house. Dad promised that when the first snow fell, he’d build the biggest snowball in the state of Idaho. What he’d do, he said, was hike to the mountain base and gather a small, insignificant ball of snow, then roll it down the hillside, watching it triple in size each time it raced over a hillock or down a ravine. By the time it reached the house, which was atop the last hill before the valley, it’d be big as Grandpa’s barn and people on the highway would stare up at it, amazed. We just needed the right snow. Thick, sticky flakes. After every snowfall, we brought handfuls to him and watched him rub the flakes between his fingers. That snow was too fine. This, too wet. After Christmas, he said. That’s when you get the real snow. But after Christmas Dad seemed to deflate, to collapse in on himself. He stopped talking about the snowball, then he stopped talking altogether. A darkness gathered in his eyes until it filled them. He walked with his arms limp, shoulders slumping, as if something had hold of him and was dragging him to the earth. By January Dad couldn’t get out of bed. He lay flat on his back, staring blankly at the stucco ceiling with its intricate pattern of ridges and veins. He didn’t blink when I brought his dinner plate each night. I’m not sure he knew I was there. That’s when Mother announced we were going to Arizona. She said Dad was like a sunflower—he’d die in the snow—and that come February he needed to be taken away and planted in the sun. So we piled into the station wagon and drove for twelve hours, winding through canyons and speeding over dark freeways, until we arrived at the mobile home in the parched Arizona desert where my grandparents were waiting out the winter. We arrived a few hours after sunrise. Dad made it as far as Grandma’s porch, where he stayed for the rest of the day, a knitted pillow under his head, a callused hand on his stomach.

• From Educated (2018)

  He kept that posture for two days, eyes open, not saying a word, still as a bush in that dry, windless heat. On the third day he seemed to come back into himself, to become aware of the goings-on around him, to listen to our mealtime chatter rather than staring, unresponsive, at the carpet. After dinner that night, Grandma played her phone messages, which were mostly neighbors and friends saying hello. Then a woman’s voice came through the speaker to remind Grandma of her doctor’s appointment the following day. That message had a dramatic effect on Dad. At first Dad asked Grandma questions: what was the appointment for, who was it with, why would she see a doctor when Mother could give her tinctures. Dad had always believed passionately in Mother’s herbs, but that night felt different, like something inside him was shifting, a new creed taking hold. Herbalism, he said, was a spiritual doctrine that separated the wheat from the tares, the faithful from the faithless. Then he used a word I’d never heard before: Illuminati. It sounded exotic, powerful, whatever it was. Grandma, he said, was an unknowing agent of the Illuminati. God couldn’t abide faithlessness, Dad said. That’s why the most hateful sinners were those who wouldn’t make up their minds, who used herbs and medication both, who came to Mother on Wednesday and saw their doctor on Friday—or, as Dad put it, “Who worship at the altar of God one day and offer a sacrifice to Satan the next.” These people were like the ancient Israelites because they’d been given a true religion but hankered after false idols. “Doctors and pills,” Dad said, nearly shouting. “That’s their god, and they whore after it.” Mother was staring at her food. At the word “whore” she stood, threw Dad an angry look, then walked into her room and slammed the door. Mother didn’t always agree with Dad. When Dad wasn’t around, I’d heard her say things that he—or at least this new incarnation of him—would have called sacrilege, things like, “Herbs are supplements. For something serious, you should go to a doctor.” Dad took no notice of Mother’s empty chair. “Those doctors aren’t trying to save you,” he told Grandma. “They’re trying to kill you.” When I think of that dinner, the scene comes back to me clearly. I’m sitting at the table. Dad is talking, his voice urgent. Grandma sits across from me, chewing her asparagus again and again in her crooked jaw, the way a goat might, sipping from her ice water, giving no indication that she’s heard a word Dad has said, except for the occasional vexed glare she throws the clock when it tells her it’s still too early for bed. “You’re a knowing participant in the plans of Satan,” Dad says. This scene played every day, sometimes several times a day, for the rest of the trip. All followed a similar script.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I began to shake. My heart was pounding. Months after signing a new contract with me, Onitsuka was plotting to break it? Had they been spooked when I was late taking delivery of the spring shipment? Had Kitami simply decided he didn’t care for me? My only hope was that this distributor on the East Coast was lying. Or mistaken. Maybe he’d misunderstood Onitsuka. Maybe it was a language thing? I wrote to Fujimoto. I said I hoped he was still enjoying the bicycle I bought him. (Subtle.) I asked him to find out anything he could. He wrote back right away. The distributor was telling the truth. Onitsuka was considering a clean break with Blue Ribbon, and Kitami was in touch with several distributors in the United States. There was no firm plan to break my contract, Fujimoto added, but candidates were being vetted and scouted. I tried to focus on the good. There was no firm plan. This meant there was still hope. I could still restore Onitsuka’s faith, change Kitami’s mind. I would just need to remind Kitami of what Blue Ribbon was, and who I was. Which would mean inviting him to the United States for a friendly visit. 1971“Guess who’s coming to dinner,” Woodell said. He wheeled into my office and handed me the telex. Ki-tami had accepted my invitation. He was coming to Portland to spend a few days. Then he was going to make a wider tour of the United States, for reasons he declined to share. “Visiting other potential distributors,” I said to Woodell. He nodded. It was March 1971. We vowed that Kitami was going to have the time of his life, that he would return home feeling love in his heart for America, Oregon, Blue Ribbon—and me. When we were done with him he’d be incapable of doing business with anyone else. And so, we agreed, the visit should close on a high note, with a gala dinner at the home of our prize asset—Bowerman. IN MOUNTING THIS charm offensive, naturally I enlisted Penny. Together we met Kitami’s flight, and together we whisked him straight to the Oregon coast, to her parents’ oceanfront cottage, where we’d spent our wedding night. Kitami had a companion with him, a sort of bag carrier, personal assistant, amanuensis, named Hiraku Iwano. He was just a kid, naïve, innocent, in his early twenties, and Penny had him eating out of her hand before we hit Sunset Highway.

• From Educated (2018)

  It was the first time I’d seen Nick since the explosion. I might have told him everything right then: that my family didn’t believe in modern medicine; that we were treating the burn at home with salves and homeopathy; that it had been terrifying, worse than terrifying; that for as long as I lived I would never forget the smell of charred flesh. I could have told him all that, could have surrendered the weight, let the bond between us carry it and grow stronger. Instead I kept the burden for myself, and my friendship with Nick, already anemic, underfed and underused, dwindled in obsolescence. I believed I could repair the damage—that now I was back, this would be my life, and it wouldn’t matter that Nick understood nothing of Buck’s Peak. But the peak refused to give me up. It clung to me. The black craters in my father’s chest often materialized on chalkboards, and I saw the sagging cavity of his mouth on the pages of my textbooks. This remembered world was somehow more vivid than the physical world I inhabited, and I phased between them. Nick would take my hand, and for a moment I would be there with him, feeling the surprise of his skin on mine. But when I looked at our joined fingers, something would shift so that the hand was not Nick’s. It was bloody and clawed, not a hand at all. When I slept, I gave myself wholly to the peak. I dreamed of Luke, of his eyes rolling back in his head. I dreamed of Dad, of the slow rattle in his lungs. I dreamed of Shawn, of the moment my wrist had cracked in the parking lot. I dreamed of myself, limping beside him, laughing that high, horrible cackle. But in my dreams I had long, silvery hair. —THE WEDDING WAS IN SEPTEMBER. I arrived at the church full of anxious energy, as though I’d been sent through time from some disastrous future to this moment, when my actions still had weight and my thoughts, consequences. I didn’t know what I’d been sent to do, so I wrung my hands and chewed my cheeks, waiting for the crucial moment. Five minutes before the ceremony, I vomited in the women’s bathroom. When Emily said “I do,” the vitality left me. I again became a spirit, and drifted back to BYU. I stared at the Rockies from my bedroom window and was struck by how implausible they seemed. Like paintings. A week after the wedding I broke up with Nick—callously, I’m ashamed to say. I never told him of my life before, never sketched for him the world that had invaded and obliterated the one he and I had shared. I could have explained. I could have said, “That place has a hold on me, which I may never break.” That would have got to the heart of it. Instead I sank through time.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  As is always the case, the process turned out to be more complicated than it first appeared. First State Bank and the Small Business Administration required that Bowerman and I, as majority shareholders, both personally guarantee the loan. We’d done that at First National and at Bank of California, so I didn’t see a problem. I was in hock up to my neck, what was one more guarantee? Bowerman, however, balked. Retired, living on a fixed income, dispirited after the traumas of the last few years, and greatly weakened by the death of Pre, he didn’t want any more risk. He feared losing his mountain. Rather than give his personal guarantee, he offered to give me two-thirds of his stake in Blue Ribbon, at a discounted price. He was bowing out. I didn’t want this. Never mind that I didn’t have the money to buy his stake, I didn’t want to lose the cornerstone of my company, the anchor of my psyche. But Bowerman was adamant, and I knew better than to argue. So we both went to Jaqua and asked him to help broker the deal. Jaqua was still Bowerman’s best friend, but I’d come to think of him as a close friend, too. I still trusted him completely. Let’s not fully dissolve the partnership, I said to him. Though I reluctantly agreed to buy Bowerman’s stake (low payments, spread over five years), I begged him to retain a percentage, stay on as a vice president and member of our small board. Deal, he said. We all shook hands. WHILE WE WERE busy moving around stakes and dollars, the dollar itself was hemorrhaging value. It was all at once in a death spiral against the Japanese yen. Coupled with rising Japanese labor rates, this was now the most imminent threat to our existence. We’d increased and diversified sources of production, we’d added new factories in New England and Puerto Rico, but we were still doing nearly all our manufacturing in volatile Japan, mostly at Nippon Rubber. A sudden, crippling shortage of supply was a real possibility. Especially given the spike in demand for Bowerman’s waffle trainer. With its unique outer sole, and its pillowy midsole cushion, and its below-market price ($24.95), the waffle trainer was continuing to capture the popular imagination like no previous shoe. It didn’t just feel different, or fit different—it looked different. Radically so. Bright red upper, fat white swoosh—it was a revolution in aesthetics. Its look was drawing hundreds of thousands of new customers into the Nike fold, and its performance was sealing their loyalty. It had better traction and cushioning than anything on the market. Watching that shoe evolve in 1976 from popular accessory to cultural artifact, I had a thought. People might start wearing this thing to class. And the office. And the grocery store. And throughout their everyday lives.

• From Educated (2018)

  * Shawn’s undergoing this painful and expensive procedure is the reason my parents would take me to an orthodontist to correct the same defect, which was genetic. In short, because Shawn lost his canines, I was able to keep mine. [image "Chapter 12 Fish Eyes" file=Image00014.jpg] My brother Tony had taken out a loan to buy his own rig—a semi and trailer—but in order to make the payments, he had to keep the truck on the road, so that’s where he was living, on the road. Until his wife got sick and the doctor she consulted (she had consulted a doctor) put her on bed rest. Tony called Shawn and asked if he could run the rig for a week or two. Shawn hated trucking long-haul, but he said he’d do it if I came along. Dad didn’t need me in the junkyard, and Randy could spare me for a few days, so we set off, heading down to Las Vegas, then east to Albuquerque, west to Los Angeles, then up to Washington State. I’d thought I would see the cities, but mostly I saw truck stops and interstate. The windshield was enormous and elevated like a cockpit, which made the cars below seem like toys. The sleeper cab, where the bunks were, was musty and dark as a cave, littered with bags of Doritos and trail mix. Shawn drove for days with little sleep, navigating our fifty-foot trailer as if it were his own arm. He doctored the books whenever we crossed a checkpoint, to make it seem he was getting more sleep than he was. Every other day we stopped to shower and eat a meal that wasn’t dried fruit and granola. Near Albuquerque, the Walmart warehouse was backed up and couldn’t unload us for two days. We were outside the city—there was nothing but a truck stop and red sand stretching out in all directions—so we ate Cheetos and played Mario Kart in the sleeper. By sunset on the second day, our bodies ached from sitting, and Shawn said he should teach me martial arts. We had our first lesson at dusk in the parking lot. “If you know what you’re doing,” he said, “you can incapacitate a man with minimal effort. You can control someone’s whole body with two fingers. It’s about knowing where the weak points are, and how to exploit them.” He grabbed my wrist and folded it, bending my fingers downward so they reached uncomfortably toward the inside of my forearm. He continued to add pressure until I twisted slightly, wrapping my arm behind my back to relieve the strain. “See? This is a weak point,” he said. “If I fold it any more, you’ll be immobilized.” He grinned his angel grin. “I won’t, though, because it’d hurt like hell.” He let go and said, “Now you try.” I folded his wrist onto itself and squeezed hard, trying to get his upper body to collapse the way mine had. He didn’t move.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Johnson, of course, had no answers to give. He implored them to hold on, there must be some mistake. He phoned Oregon, reached Fields, and told her what was happening. He expected her to say it was all a big misunderstanding, an accounting error. Instead she whispered, “Oooh, shit.” Then hung up on him. A PARTITION WALL separated Fields’s office from mine. She ran around the wall and up to my desk. “You’d better sit down,” she blurted. “I am sitting down.” “It’s all hitting the fan,” she said. “What is?” “The checks. All the checks.” I called in Hayes. By then he weighed 330 pounds, but he seemed to be shrinking before me as Fields described to us every particular of the Johnson phone call. “We might’ve really fucked up this time,” he said. “What do we do?” I said. “I’ll call Holland,” Hayes said. Minutes later Hayes came back into my office, holding up his hands. “Holland says it’s fine, no worries, he’ll smooth things over with his bosses.” I sighed. Disaster averted. In the meantime, however, Johnson wasn’t waiting for us to get back to him. He phoned his local bank and learned that his account, for some reason, was bone dry. He called in Giampietro, who drove up the road to see an old friend, a man who owned a local box company. Giampietro asked the man for a loan of five thousand dollars, cash. An outrageous request. But the man’s box company depended on Blue Ribbon for its survival. If we went out of business, the box company might, too. So the box man became our bag man, forking over fifty crisp hundred-dollar bills. Giampietro then raced back to the factory and doled out everyone’s pay, in cash, like Jimmy Stewart keeping the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan afloat. HAYES LUMBERED INTO my office. “Holland says we need to get our asses down to the bank. Pronto.” Next thing I knew, we were all sitting in a conference room at the Bank of California. On one side of the table were Holland and two nameless men in suits. They looked like undertakers. On the other side were Hayes and I. Holland, somber, opened. “Gentlemen…” Not good, I thought. “Gentlemen?” I said. “Gentlemen? Perry, it’s us.” “Gentlemen, we’ve decided we no longer want your business at this bank.” Hayes and I stared. “Does that mean you’re throwing us out?” Hayes asked. “It does indeed,” Holland said. “You can’t do that,” Hayes said. “We can and we are,” Holland said. “We’re freezing your funds, and we will no longer honor any more checks you write on this account.” “Freezing our—! I don’t believe this,” Hayes said. “Believe it,” Holland said. I said nothing. I wrapped my arms around my torso and thought, This isn’t good, this isn’t good, this isn’t good. Never mind the embarrassment, the hassles, the cascade of bad consequences that would follow if Holland threw us out. All I could think of was Nissho.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It is a big castle, big enough to get into, and his father has fixed a real pistol barrel to the battlements. It is to fire a salute for his birthday, but the little boy stares at it in dread. His father has forced him to stand in front of the castle, and he knows he is to be executed. There is nothing he can do. He is powerless. He cries silently, inconsolably, knowing that his father will shoot him, knowing he is about to die. What must it be like to live in a world where you cry because you believe your father will kill you on your birthday, a world in which you are beaten, daily, for no reason? A world in which you write a letter to your mother in India enclosing your school photograph, and she writes back to tell you that your lips are ‘ growing sensual’, and that you should hold them in, with your teeth if necessary? I cannot imagine White’s childhood of terror and shame, but I can understand how it made him see the world as controlled by cruelty, by dictators and madmen. I can see how that powerless child in front of the play-castle never quite stopped believing that he was going to be shot. For it was not just his fear of success that made White sabotage the training of his hawk. Underlying the whole long affair was a deep repetition compulsion, the term Freud used to describe the need to re-enact painful experiences in order to master them. But with the hawk the re-enactment was the tragedy. ‘ He has been frightened into insanity, being, like all predatory people, by nature terrified at heart,’ he wrote of Gos. What had he done? He had taken something wild and free, something innocent and full of life, and fought with it. The cost of his mastery would be to reduce it to a biddable, broken-feathered, dull-eyed shadow of the bird it was meant to be. Gos had been meant to fly slantwise across dark valleys of German pines, to slay and ravine and be his own wildest self. White had thought he could tame the hawk without breaking its natural spirit. But all he has done is try to break it, over and over again. He thinks of Gos tangled in the tree, hanging there in the branches, trapped, powerless, entirely unable to move. It wasn’t conscious. None of it was conscious. But the disaster was inevitable. White saw that the hawk was himself, a bird that was a ‘youth who had been maddened by every kind of clumsiness, privation, and persecution’. And he understood, finally, terribly, that what he had done was become the persecutor , no matter how many times he told himself otherwise. The hawk was the child in front of the play-castle. He was his father . He was his father .