Joy

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 met Nasty and his wife, Dominique, a stunning woman, that Friday night, at a steakhouse in downtown Omaha. After I got him to sign on the dotted line, after I locked the papers in my briefcase, we ordered a celebratory dinner. A bottle of wine, another bottle of wine. At some point, for some reason, I started speaking with a Romanian accent, and for some reason Nasty started calling me Nasty, and for no reason I could think of his supermodel wife started making goo-goo eyes at everyone, including me, and by night’s end, stumbling up to my room, I felt like a tennis champion, and a tycoon, and a kingmaker. I lay in bed and stared at the contract. Ten thousand dollars, I said aloud. Ten. Thousand. Dollars. It was a fortune. But Nike had a celebrity athlete endorser. I closed my eyes, to stop the room from spinning. Then I opened them, because I didn’t want the room to stop spinning. Take that, Kitami, I said to the ceiling, to all of Omaha. Take that. BACK THEN, THE historic football rivalry between my University of Oregon Ducks and the dreaded Oregon State Beavers was lopsided, at best. My Ducks usually lost. And they usually lost by a lot. And they often lost with a lot on the line. Example: In 1957, with the two teams vying for the conference crown, Oregon’s Jim Shanley was going in for the winning touchdown when he fumbled on the one-yard line. Oregon lost 10–7. In 1972, my Ducks had lost to the Beavers eight straight times, sending me, eight straight times, into a sour funk. But now, in this topsy-turvy year, my Ducks were going to wear Nikes. Hollister had persuaded Oregon’s head coach, Dick Enright, to don our new waffle-soled shoes for the Big Game, the Civil War. The setting was their place, down in Corvallis. Scattered rain had been falling all morning, and it was coming down in sheets by game time. Penny and I stood in the stands, shivering inside our sopping ponchos, peering into the raindrops as the opening kickoff spun into the air. On the first play from scrimmage, Oregon’s burly quarterback, a sharpshooter named Dan Fouts, handed the ball to Donny Reynolds, who made one cut on his Nike waffles and… took it to the house. Ducks 7, Nike 7, Beavers 0.

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

  Entering the final lap, Shorter and Virgin were in front. Penny and I were jumping up and down. “We’re going to get two,” we said, “we’re going to get two!” And then we got three. Shorter and Virgin took first and second, and Bjorklund plunged ahead of Bill Rodgers at the tape to take third. I was covered with sweat. Three Olympians… in Nikes! The next morning, rather than take a victory lap at Hayward, we set up camp at the Nike store. While Johnson and I mingled with customers, Penny manned the silk-screen machine and churned out Nike T-shirts. Her craftsmanship was exquisite; all day long people came in to say they’d seen someone wearing a Nike T-shirt on the street and they just had to have one for themselves. Despite our continual melancholy about Pre, we allowed ourselves to feel joy, because it was becoming clear that Nike was doing more than making a good show. Nike was dominating those trials. Virgin took the 5,000 meters in Nikes. Shorter won the marathon in Nikes. Slowly, in the shop, in the town, we heard people whispering, Nike Nike Nike. We heard our name more than the name of any athlete. Besides Pre. Saturday afternoon, walking into Hayward to visit Bowerman, I heard someone behind me say, “Jeez, Nike is really kicking Adidas’s ass.” It might have been the highlight of the weekend, of the year, followed closely by the Puma sales rep I spotted moments later, leaning against a tree and looking suicidal. Bowerman was there strictly as a spectator, which was strange for him, and us. And yet he was wearing his standard uniform: the ratty sweater, the low ball cap. At one point he formally requested a meeting in a small office under the east grandstand. The office wasn’t really an office, more like a closet, where the groundskeepers stored their rakes and brooms and a few canvas chairs. There was barely room for the coach and Johnson and me, never mind the others invited by the coach: Hollister, and Dennis Vixie, a local podiatrist who worked with Bowerman as a shoe consultant. As we shut the door I noticed Bowerman didn’t look like himself. At Pre’s funeral he’d seemed old. Now he seemed lost. After a minute of small talk he started bellowing. He complained that he wasn’t getting any “respect” anymore from Nike. We’d built him a home lab, and supplied him with a lasting machine, but he said that he was constantly asking in vain for raw materials from Exeter. Johnson looked horrified. “What materials?” he asked. “I ask for shoe uppers and my requests are ignored!” Bowerman said. Johnson turned to Vixie. “I sent you the uppers!” he said. “Vixie—didn’t you get them?” Vixie looked perplexed. “Yes, I got them.” Bowerman took off his ball cap, put it back on, took it off. “Yeah, well,” he grumbled, “but you didn’t send the outer soles.” Johnson’s face reddened. “I sent those, too! Vixie?”

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

  1964 T he notice arrived right around Christmas, so I must have driven down to the waterfront warehouse the first week of 1964. I don’t recall exactly. I know it was early morning. I can see myself getting there before the clerks unlocked the doors. I handed them the notice and they went into the back and returned with a large box covered in Japanese writing. I raced home, scurried down to the basement, ripped open the box. Twelve pairs of shoes, creamy white, with blue stripes down the sides. God, they were beautiful. They were more than beautiful. I’d seen nothing in Florence or Paris that surpassed them. I wanted to put them on marble pedestals, or in gilt-edged frames. I held them up to the light, caressed them as sacred objects, the way a writer might treat a new set of notebooks, or a baseball player a rack of bats. Then I sent two pairs to my old track coach at Oregon, Bill Bowerman. I did so without a second thought, since it was Bowerman who’d first made me think, really think , about what people put on their feet. Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod. In the four years I’d run for him at Oregon, Bowerman was constantly sneaking into our lockers and stealing our footwear. He’d spend days tearing them apart, stitching them back up, then hand them back with some minor modification, which made us either run like deer or bleed. Regardless of the results, he never stopped. He was determined to find new ways of bolstering the instep, cushioning the midsole, building out more room for the forefoot. He always had some new design, some new scheme to make our shoes sleeker, softer, lighter. Especially lighter. One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes, he said, is equivalent to 55 pounds over one mile. He wasn’t kidding. His math was solid. You take the average man’s stride of six feet, spread it out over a mile (5,280 feet), you get 880 steps. Remove one ounce from each step—that’s 55 pounds on the button. Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated to less burden, which meant more energy, which meant more speed. And speed equaled winning. Bowerman didn’t like to lose. (I got it from him.) Thus lightness was his constant goal. Goal is putting it kindly. In quest of lightness he was willing to try anything. Animal, vegetable, mineral, any material was eligible if it might improve on the standard shoe leather of the day. That sometimes meant kangaroo skin. Other times, cod. You haven’t lived until you’ve competed against the fastest runners in the world wearing shoes made of cod. There were four or five of us on the track team who were Bowerman’s podiatry guinea pigs, but I was his pet project.

• From Educated (2018)

  Learning to dance felt like learning to belong. I could memorize the movements and, in doing so, step into their minds, lunging when they lunged, reaching my arms upward in time with theirs. Sometimes, when I glanced at the mirror and saw the tangle of our twirling forms, I couldn’t immediately discern myself in the crowd. It didn’t matter that I was wearing a gray T-shirt—a goose among swans. We moved together, a single flock. We began rehearsals for the Christmas recital, and Caroline called Mother to discuss the costume. “The skirt will be how long?” Mother said. “And sheer? No, that’s not going to work.” I heard Caroline say something about what the other girls in the class would want to wear. “Tara can’t wear that,” Mother said. “If that’s what the other girls are wearing, she will stay home.” On the Wednesday after Caroline called Mother, I arrived at Papa Jay’s a few minutes early. The younger class had just finished, and the store was flooded with six-year-olds, prancing for their mothers in red velvet hats and skirts sparkling with sequins of deep scarlet. I watched them wiggle and leap through the aisles, their thin legs covered only by sheer tights. I thought they looked like tiny harlots. The rest of my class arrived. When they saw the outfits, they rushed into the studio to see what Caroline had for them . Caroline was standing next to a cardboard box full of large gray sweatshirts. She began handing them out. “Here are your costumes!” she said. The girls held up their sweatshirts, eyebrows raised in disbelief. They had expected chiffon or ribbon, not Fruit of the Loom. Caroline had tried to make the sweatshirts more appealing by sewing large Santas, bordered with glitter, on the fronts, but this only made the dingy cotton seem dingier. Mother hadn’t told Dad about the recital, and neither had I. I didn’t ask him to come. There was an instinct at work in me, a learned intuition. The day of the recital, Mother told Dad I had a “thing” that night. Dad asked a lot of questions, which surprised Mother, and after a few minutes she admitted it was a dance recital. Dad grimaced when Mother told him I’d been taking lessons from Caroline Moyle, and I thought he was going to start talking about California socialism again, but he didn’t. Instead he got his coat and the three of us walked to the car. The recital was held at the church. Everyone was there, with flashing cameras and bulky camcorders. I changed into my costume in the same room where I attended Sunday school. The other girls chatted cheerfully; I pulled on my sweatshirt, trying to stretch the material a few more inches. I was still tugging it downward when we lined up on the stage. Music played from a stereo on the piano and we began to dance, our feet tapping in sequence.

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

  The picnic was on Awaji, a tiny island off Kobe. We took a small boat to get there, and when we arrived we saw long tables set up along the beach, each one covered with platters of seafood and bowls of noodles and rice. Beside the tables were tubs filled with cold bottles of soda and beer. Everyone was wearing bathing suits and sunglasses and laughing. People I’d only known in a reserved, corporate setting were being silly and carefree. Late in the day there were competitions. Team-building exercises like potato sack relays and foot races along the surf. I showed off my speed, and everyone bowed to me as I crossed the finish line first. Everyone agreed that Skinny Gaijin was very fast. I was picking up the language, slowly. I knew the Japanese word for shoe: gutzu. I knew the Japanese word for revenue: shunyu. I knew how to ask the time, and directions, and I learned a phrase I used often: Watakushi domo no kaisha ni tsuite no joh hou des. Here is some information about my company. Toward the end of the picnic I sat on the sand and looked out across the Pacific Ocean. I was living two separate lives, both wonderful, both merging. Back home I was part of a team, me and Woodell and Johnson—and now Penny. Here in Japan I was part of a team, me and Kitami and all the good people of Onitsuka. By nature I was a loner, but since childhood I’d thrived in team sports. My psyche was in true harmony when I had a mix of alone time and team time. Exactly what I had now. Also, I was doing business with a country I’d come to love. Gone was the initial fear. I connected with the shyness of the Japanese people, with the simplicity of their culture and products and arts. I liked that they tried to add beauty to every part of life, from the tea ceremony to the commode. I liked that the radio announced each day exactly which cherry trees, on which corner, were blossoming, and how much. My reverie was interrupted when a man named Fujimoto sat beside me. Fiftyish, slouch-shouldered, he had a gloomy air that seemed more than middle-age melancholy. Like a Japanese Charlie Brown. And yet I could see that he was making a concerted effort to extend himself, to be cheerful toward me. He forced a big smile and told me that he loved America, that he longed to live there. I told him that I’d just been thinking how much I loved Japan. “Maybe we should trade places,” I said. He smiled ruefully. “Any time.” I complimented his English. He said he’d learned it from the American GIs. “Funny,” I said, “the first things I learned about Japanese culture, I learned from two ex-GIs.” The first words his GIs taught him, he said, were, “Kiss my ass!” We had a good laugh about that.

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

  The howling grew louder. So Strasser picked up his binder and threw it against the wall. “Fuck all you guys,” he said. The binder burst open, pages flew everywhere, and the laughter was deafening. Even Strasser couldn’t help himself. He had to join in. Little wonder that Strasser’s nickname was Rolling Thunder. Hayes, meanwhile, was Doomsday. Woodell was Weight. (As in Dead Weight.) Johnson was Four Factor, because he tended to exaggerate and therefore everything he said needed to be divided by four. No one took it personally. The only thing truly not tolerated at a Buttface was a thin skin. And sobriety. At day’s end, when everybody had a scratchy throat from all the abusing and laughing and problem-solving, when our yellow legal pads were filled with ideas, solutions, quotations, and lists upon lists, we’d shift ground to the bar at the lodge and continue the meeting over drinks. Many drinks. The bar was called the Owl’s Nest. I love to close my eyes and remember us storming through the entrance, scattering all other patrons. Or making friends of them. We’d buy drinks for the house, then commandeer a corner and continue laying into each other about some problem or idea or harebrained scheme. Say the problem was midsoles not getting from Point A to Point B. Round and round we’d go, everyone speaking at once, a chorale of name-calling and finger-pointing, all made louder, and funnier, and somehow clearer, by the booze. To anyone in the Owl’s Nest, to anyone in the corporate world, it would have looked inefficient, inappropriate. Even scandalous. But before the bartender gave last call, we’d know full well why those midsoles weren’t getting from Point A to Point B, and the person responsible would be contrite, and put on notice, and we’d have ourselves a creative solution. The only person who didn’t join us in these late-night revels was Johnson. He’d typically go for a head-clearing run, then retreat to his room and read in bed. I don’t think he ever set foot in the Owl’s Nest. Or knew where it was. We’d always have to spend the first part of the next morning updating him on what we’d decided in his absence.

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

  The setting was their place, down in Corvallis. Scattered rain had been falling all morning, and it was coming down in sheets by game time. Penny and I stood in the stands, shivering inside our sopping ponchos, peering into the raindrops as the opening kickoff spun into the air. On the first play from scrimmage, Oregon’s burly quarterback, a sharpshooter named Dan Fouts, handed the ball to Donny Reynolds, who made one cut on his Nike waffles and… took it to the house . Ducks 7, Nike 7, Beavers 0. Fouts, closing out a brilliant college career, was out of his mind that night. He passed for three hundred yards, including a sixty-yard touchdown bomb that landed like a feather in his receiver’s hands. The rout was soon on. At the final gun my Ducks were on top of the Bucktooths, 30–3. I always called them my Ducks, but now they really were. They were in my shoes. Every step they took, every cut they made, was partly mine. It’s one thing to watch a sporting event and put yourself in the players’ shoes. Every fan does that. It’s another thing when the athletes are actually in your shoes. I laughed as we walked to the car. I laughed like a maniac. I laughed all the way back to Portland. This, I kept telling Penny, this is how 1972 needed to end. With a victory. Any victory would have been healing, but this, oh boy—this.

• From Educated (2018)

  The music stopped my breath. I’d heard the piano played countless times before, to accompany hymns, but when Mary played it, the sound was nothing like that formless clunking. It was liquid, it was air. It was rock one moment and wind the next. The next day, when Mary returned from the school, I asked her if instead of money she would give me lessons. We perched on the piano bench and she showed me a few finger exercises. Then she asked what else I was learning besides the piano. Dad had told me what to say when people asked about my schooling. “I do school every day,” I said. “Do you meet other kids?” she asked. “Do you have friends?” “Sure,” I said. Mary returned to the lesson. When we’d finished and I was ready to go, she said, “My sister Caroline teaches dance every Wednesday in the back of Papa Jay’s. There are lots of girls your age. You could join.” That Wednesday, I left Randy’s early and pedaled to the gas station. I wore jeans, a large gray T-shirt, and steel-toed boots; the other girls wore black leotards and sheer, shimmering skirts, white tights and tiny ballet shoes the color of taffy. Caroline was younger than Mary. Her makeup was flawless and gold hoops flashed through chestnut curls. She arranged us in rows, then showed us a short routine. A song played from a boom box in the corner. I’d never heard it before but the other girls knew it. I looked in the mirror at our reflection, at the twelve girls, sleek and shiny, pirouetting blurs of black, white and pink. Then at myself, large and gray. When the lesson finished, Caroline told me to buy a leotard and dance shoes. “I can’t,” I said. “Oh.” She looked uncomfortable. “Maybe one of the girls can lend you one.” She’d misunderstood. She thought I didn’t have money. “It isn’t modest,” I said. Her lips parted in surprise. These Californian Moyles, I thought. “Well, you can’t dance in boots,” she said. “I’ll talk to your mother.” A few days later, Mother drove me forty miles to a small shop whose shelves were lined with exotic shoes and strange acrylic costumes. Not one was modest. Mother went straight to the counter and told the attendant we needed a black leotard, white tights and jazz shoes. “Keep those in your room,” Mother said as we left the store. She didn’t need to say anything else. I already understood that I should not show the leotard to Dad. That Wednesday, I wore the leotard and tights with my gray T-shirt over the top. The T-shirt reached almost to my knees, but even so I was ashamed to see so much of my legs. Dad said a righteous woman never shows anything above her ankle. The other girls rarely spoke to me, but I loved being there with them. I loved the sensation of conformity.

• From City of Night (1963)

  A couple of blocks away from Main Street, on Spring—squashed on either side by gray apartment buildings (walls greasy from days of cheap cooking, cobwebbed lightbulbs feebly hiding in opaque darkness, windowscreens if any smooth as velvet with grime — where queens and hustlers and other exiles hibernate) —just beyond the hobo cafeteria where panhandlers hang dismally outside in the cruel neonlight (fugitives from the owlfaces of the Salvation Army fighting Evil with no help from God or the cops; fugitives from Uplifting mission-words and lambstew) —is the 1-2-3. Outside, a cluster of pushers gather like nervous caged monkeys, openly offering pills and maryjane thrills, and you see them scurrying antlike to consult with Dad-o, the Negro king of downtown smalltime pushers—and Dad-o, sitting royally at the bar like a heap of very black shiny dough, says yes or no arbitrarily. And that is the way it is. I saw Miss Destiny again one Saturday night at the 1-2-3. And that is when it swings. “Oooee...” she squealed. “I wondered where you were, baby, and I have thought about you—and thought, why hes gone already— Escaped! —and oh Im so glad youre not, and come here, I want you to meet my dear sistuhs and their boyfriends—” being, naturally, the downtown queens and hustlers who are Miss Destiny’s friends. And squeezing expertly through the thick crowd, Miss Destiny led me into a cavern of trapped exiles—of painted sallow-faced youngmen, artificial manikin faces like masks; of tough-looking masculine hustlers, young fugitives from everywhere and everything, young lean faces already proclaiming Doom; of jaded old and middle-aged men seeking the former and all-aged homosexuals seeking the latter—all crowded into this long narrow, ugly bar, plaster crumbling in chunks as if it had gnawed its own way into the wall; long benches behind the tables, splintered, decaying; mirrors streaked yellow—a bar without visible windows; cigarette smoke tinged occasionally with the unmistakable odor of maryjane hovering over us almost unmoving like an ominous hand.... And the faces emerge from the thick smoke like in those dark moody photographs which give you the feeling that the subjects have been imprisoned by the camera. “This is Trudi,” Miss Destiny was saying, and Trudi is probably the realest and sweetest-looking queen in L.A., and youd have to be completely queer not to dig her. Her hair is long enough for a woman, short enough for a man.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Then, instead of mumbles, silence, and no eye contact, “if Tisha got something right, they would shout ‘You go, girl!’” and eventually “the kids were celebrating one another’s success without me, and that was huge.” He described the classroom now as “full of life.” He said, “I know it sounds cliché, but you could say ‘the sun rose on a dark day,’ [and] they would just shout out answers and it got to the point where they were almost too willing and it was incredible.” The atmosphere Jeremy and his students created was “almost celebratory” and truly interactive, like a church in which shouts of “Hallelujah!” come from any pew. Or, as Jeremy summed it up: “It was like a party, except with math.” This huge emotional turnaround paid dividends. Ty got an A and told his mom, for the first time ever, that he liked math. The kid with the IQ in the fifties passed the class. Another went from the fourteenth to the forty-fourth percentile. “I remember she told me, ‘Mr. Wills, I am going to pass, I’m going to pass,’ and she did and that was what was incredible.” Indeed, more than 80 percent of Jeremy’s special ed kids passed the state’s standardized math test. When you compare that to the 50 percent pass rate of the regular ed kids in the same high school, you begin to see how remarkable this transformation was. One grandmother called to find out whether her granddaughter passed, and when Jeremy told her she did, “she was like, ‘Hallelujah! Thank the Lord Jesus!!’ ” Understandably, Jeremy was immensely gratified. With poignancy he shared that “when I think about how someone, somewhere down the line, did something horrible to make these kids not like learning and to see their love of learning rekindled was almost like, sort of this . . . I don’t know . . . it is very hard to describe . . . it is almost surreal. When you see the look on their face when they start to believe in themselves again. . . .” He admits that it didn’t work for everyone, but for most it did. “I can safely say that a lot of them walked out of that classroom as far more confident and capable people than they walked in.” As for Jeremy himself, once his classroom climate began to turn around, he began to sleep better. He felt that he had more energy to give. He not only felt better, but his hair stopped falling out. He said to me, “I feel like a far more capable and confident person because of it.” The experience taught him both how and why to be optimistic. He drew on what he learned in TFA and in my course to “overcome probably the most difficult challenge” of his life in ways that have “applicability throughout life.”

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Of course, not every infant-parent interaction is so rosy. Some pairs show little mutual engagement. Some moms and dads rarely make eye contact with their infants and emit precious little positivity, either verbally or nonverbally. These pairs are simply less attuned to each other, less connected. And in those rare moments when they are engaged, the vibe that joins them is distinctly more negative. They connect over mutual distress or indifference, rather than over mutual affection. It turns out that positive behavioral synchrony—the degree to which an infant and a parent (through eye contact and affectionate touch) laugh, smile, and coo together—goes hand in hand with oxytocin synchrony. Researchers have measured oxytocin levels in the saliva of dads, moms, and infants both before and after a videotaped, face-to-face parent-infant interaction. For infant-parent pairs who show mutual positive engagement, oxytocin levels also come into sync. Without such engagement, however, no oxytocin synchrony emerges. Positivity resonance, then, can be viewed as the doorway through which the exquisitely attuned biochemical tendencies of one generation influence those of the next generation to form lasting, often lifelong bonds. Knowing, too, that oxytocin can ebb and flow in unison among non-kin—even among brand-new acquaintances just learning to trust each other—micro-moments of love, of positivity resonance, can also be viewed as the doorways through which caring and compassionate communities are forged. Love, we know, builds lasting resources. Oxytocin, studies show, swings the hammer. This core tenet of my broaden-and-build theory—that love builds lasting resources—finds support in a fascinating program of research on . . . rodents. It turns out that rat moms and their newborn pups show a form of positive engagement and synchrony analogous to that of human parents with their infants. Sensitive parenting in a rat mom, however, is conveyed by her attentively licking and grooming her newborn pups. When a rat mom licks and grooms her pup, it increases the pup’s sensitivity to oxytocin, as indicated, for instance, by the number of oxytocin receptors deep within the pup’s amygdala, as well as within other subcortical brain regions. Sure enough, these well-groomed—or I dare say well-loved—rat pups grow up to have calmer demeanors; they’re less skittish, more curious. The researchers can be certain that it’s the experiences of loving connection that determine the brain and behavioral profiles of the next generation (that is, their oxytocin receptors and calm demeanors)—and not simply shared genes—because cross-fostering studies show the same patterns of results. That is, even when a rat mom raises a newborn pup that is not her own, her maternal attention still forecasts that pup’s brain sensitivity to oxytocin and whether it grows up to be anxious or calm. Touring Vagus

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  And even in the orthodox church these measures did not secure entire uniformity. For the council of Nicaea, probably from prudence, passed by the question of the Roman and Alexandrian computation of Easter. At least the Acts contain no reference to it.751 At all events this difference remained: that Rome, afterward as before, fixed the vernal equinox, the terminus a quo of the Easter full moon, on the 18th of March, while Alexandria placed it correctly on the 21st. It thus occurred, that the Latins, the very year after the Nicene council, and again in the years 330, 333, 340, 341, 343, varied from the Alexandrians in the time of keeping Easter. On this account the council of Sardica, as we learn from the recently discovered Paschal Epistles of Athanasius, took the Easter question again in hand, and brought about, by mutual concessions, a compromise for the ensuing fifty years, but without permanent result. In 387 the difference of the Egyptian and the Roman Easter amounted to fully five weeks. Later attempts also to adjust the matter were in vain, until the monk Dionysius Exiguus, the author of our Christian calendar, succeeded in harmonizing the computation of Easter on the basis of the true Alexandrian reckoning; except that the Gallican and British Christians adhered still longer to the old custom, and thus fell into conflict with the Anglo-Saxon. The introduction of the improved Gregorian calendar in the Western church in 1582 again produced discrepancy; the Eastern and Russian church adhered to the Julian calendar, and is consequently now about twelve days behind us. According to the Gregorian calendar, which does not divide the months with astronomical exactness, it sometimes happens that the Paschal full moon is put a couple of hours too early, and the Christian Easter, as was the case in 1825, coincides with the Jewish Passover, against the express order of the council of Nicaea. § 80. The Cycle of Pentecost. The whole period of seven weeks from Easter to Pentecost bore a joyous, festal character. It was called Quinquagesima, or Pentecost in the wider sense,752 and was the memorial of the exaltation of Christ at the right hand of the Father, His repeated appearances during the mysterious forty days, and His heavenly headship and eternal presence in the church. It was regarded as a continuous Sunday, and distinguished by the absence of all fasting and by standing in prayer. Quinquagesima formed a marked contrast with the Quadragesima which preceded. The deeper the sorrow of repentance had been in view of the suffering and dying Saviour, the higher now rose the joy of faith in the risen and eternally living Redeemer. This joy, of course, must keep itself clear of worldly amusements, and be sanctified by devotion, prayer, singing, and thanksgiving; and the theatres, therefore, remained closed through the fifty days. But the multitude of nominal Christians soon forgot their religious impressions, and sought to compensate their previous fasting with wanton merry-making.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘Sit there – on you go.’ The hawk hops onto the rail of the wooden veranda and turns to face me in a low boxer’s crouch. I step back six feet, put half a chick in my glove, extend my arm and whistle. There is no hesitation. There is a scratch of talons on wood, a flowering of feathers, one deep downstroke, the brief, heavy swing of talons brought up and into play and the dull thud as she hits my glove. When she has finished eating we do it again, and this time I stand a little further away. Eight feet: three wingbeats, another reward. For a creature with the tactical intelligence of a goshawk this game is child’s play. The third time I put her on the railing she is already airborne as I turn my back: a skip of my heart, a hastily extended glove and she is at my side, wolfing down the rest of her food, crest raised, wings dropped, eyes blazing, a thing of perfect triumph. I thread her leash back through the swivel and untie the creance. That will do for today. She flew perfectly. And I’m so pleased with how the lesson has gone I start singing on the way home. I serenade my hawk with ‘My Favourite Things’, with whiskers and kittens and brown paper packages tied up with string. It strikes me that this must be happiness. That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done. But watching television from the sofa later that evening I notice tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps I am allergic to something. I wipe the tears away and go to make more tea in the kitchen, where a dead white rabbit is defrosting like a soft toy in an evidence bag, and the striplight flickers ominously, undecided whether to illuminate the room or cease working entirely. These calling-off lessons teach the hawk to fly immediately to an upraised glove and a whistle. Rapid response is the key to success. If the hawk doesn’t come straight away there’s no point in waiting minutes on end, whistling and calling; it’s better to end the training session and try again later. White did not know this, and it is one of the reasons why his first attempt to call Gos is so painful to read. But what upset me most about that sorry episode wasn’t the wait that taught the hawk nothing, nor the sadistic tug on the creance that pitched poor Gos to the ground. It wasn’t even that he’d taken so long to reward the hawk that it had no understanding that the food it was given was a reward at all. It was this: that once the hawk decided to walk towards him, White had run away.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Alan the eagle-man is drinking tea from a plastic cup, resting an arm on the tall perch of a saker falcon, which looks up at him with a mild and playful eye. I can’t sit still. I go for a walk round the fair. It is not very big, but it is full of surprising things. Smoke from an oil-drum barbecue curling through drying chestnut leaves. Beneath the tree an ancient wooden cider press pouring apple juice into cups. The crushed apples fall into mounds of oxidising pulp beside it and the man working the mechanism is shouting something to the craggy plantsman on the next stand with stripling trees for sale. I find a cake stand, a face-painting stand, a stand of vivaria full of snakes, spiders and stick insects the size of your hand. A stall of orange pumpkins by an ice-cream van. A boy kneeling by a hutch staring at a rabbit under a paper sign that says MY NAME IS FLOPSEY. ‘Hello, Flopsey,’ he says, bringing his hand up to the wire. I walk into a white marquee, and inside, in dim green shade, find trestle-tables displaying hundreds of apple varieties. Some are the size of a hen’s egg; some are giant, sprawling cookers you’d need two hands to hold. Each variety sits in a labelled wooden compartment. I walk slowly along the apples, glorying in their little differences. Soft orange, streaked with tiger-spots of pink. Charles Ross. Berkshire pre 1890. Dual use. A little one with bark-like blush markings over a pale green ground. Coronation. Sussex 1902. Dessert. Miniature green boulders, the side in shadow deep rose. Chivers Delight. Cambridgeshire 1920. Dessert. Huge apple, deep yellow with hyperspace-spotting of rich red. Peasgood’s Nonsuch. Lincolnshire 1853. Dual use. The apples cheer me. The stalls have too. I decide the fair is a wonderful thing. I wander back to my chair, and as Mabel relaxes, so do I. I wolf down a burger, gossip with my falconer friends. Stories are told, jokes are made, old grievances aired, the qualities and abilities and flights of various hawks discussed in minute detail. It strikes me suddenly how much British falconry has changed since the days of Blaine and White. Back then it was the secretive, aristocratic sport of officers and gentlemen. In Germany, falconry had fed into the terrible dreams of an invented Aryan past. Yet here we are now in all our variousness. A carpenter ex-biker, a zookeeper ex-soldier, two other zookeepers, an electrician and an erstwhile historian. Four men, two women, two eagles, three falcons and a goshawk. I swig from a bottle of cider and this company is suddenly all I’d ever wished for. ‘Excuse me? Is that a goshawk?’ He’s in his forties, with glasses. A thickset, cheerful man holding a wriggling toddler. ‘Hang on, Tom,’ he says. ‘We’re going to get an ice-cream. I just want to talk to this lady for a second.’ I grin.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Soon after he leaves a cyclist skids to a halt and asks politely if he can look at the bird. He is absurdly handsome. He stands there with his Antonio Banderas hair, and his expensive technical jacket and titanium bike beaded with rain, and admires the hell out of her. ‘She is beautiful,’ he says. He is trying to find another word but it evades him. Beautiful will have to do. He says it again. Then he thanks me over and over again for the hawk. ‘So close!’ he says. ‘I have never seen a hawk so close.’ In Mexico he has only seen wild ones, and only far away. ‘I like to watch them because they are . . .’ And he makes a movement with one hand as if it were something lifting into the air. ‘Free,’ I say. He nods, and I do too, and in some wonder, because I am beginning to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of a stranger urges confession, urges confidences, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holiday. ‘We are outsiders now, Mabel,’ I say, and the thought is not unpleasant. But I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn’t entirely normal. I’m in an expansive, celebratory mood. Today Mabel flew four feet to my fist from the back of a chair in my front room. ‘You’re doing brilliantly,’ I tell her. ‘Time for a walk. Let’s go and meet my friend’s kids. They’ll love you.’ A few minutes later I knock on a door and my friend’s husband opens it. My hawk flinches. So do I: this man was exceptionally rude to me once. But whatever. It doesn’t matter. Maybe he was having a bad day. Forgive, forget. My friend isn’t in. I stand before the door and tell him about the hawk. I tell him her age, her sex, her species, her name. I tell him that I’d thought her taming would be the kind of agonising battle I’d read about in The Goshawk. ‘But it’s been a total surprise,’ I say. ‘There’s been no battle at all. Which isn’t my doing, I’m sure. She’s a freakishly calm hawk.’ And the man inclines his head to one side, and smiles. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘that’ll be a gendered thing.’ ‘Gendered?’ ‘Yes. You’re a woman, and she’s female. Of course you get on,’ he says.

• From City of Night (1963)

  An I climbed that fence, an there he is, that horse, jes starin me in the eye, an me starin back at him. An, man, I tell you; that horse, he smiled at me—crooked, you know—but smiling. An I figure he jes started roaming, like me—an somehow I knowed he was lookin for me. See, we’re in the same spot—both beginning. An I smiled back.... An, man, that horse understood! He nods his head, saying yes. Yes! So I jumped on him, an I rode away.... Along them beautiful plains, those crazy clouds— ooo-ee! —man, I couldda been going to Heaven an I wouldnuh been any Happier.... But then these three mean studs ride up to me on horses—an they say Im stealing this here guy’s horse. Stealing it, man! If anything, we stole each other.... So I figure, hell, they are gonna lynch me, like I seen in the flix.... But I was jes a kid an that man they took me to, the owner, he was kinda nice. He understands, an he offers me a gig.... But it was not like I figgered. I jes worked aroun the place, doing, you know, odd things. It was not that I minded it or nothin. It was jes this: I never got to be near that horse no more—except when I got drunk,” he smiled. “Then I would go an find him—an he would be waiting there for me, his neck up straight, waiting. An we’d take off again. It happen over an over. I jes couldnt keep away from that Horse.... Then, one time, the owner, he says he hates to do it but hes gonna get me busted to teach me a lesson if I do it again. Well, it happen again. I got high, an I rode that horse into them hills—and this time I got busted, jes like the man said. The cop said I was a menace.... So I left that place.... An what bugs me: I never said goodbye to my Horse.... And when I left, I think: Well, hell, it ain like in the movies”.... It was the only note—perhaps not even there—of bitterness I remember ever having detected in his voice. But now he laughed: “I figure then my saddle days is over—thumbing days beginning. Yahoo!... An this guy gives me a ride—an that was the first guy ever put the make on me. See—you wone believe it, but it is the truth—when we got to this motel, he says we will stay there overnight. An I was deadass tired, so I say sure....

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But I do miss her; and she was a lovely looker - though not quite as lovely, if you don’t mind my saying so, as her sister has gone and turned out ...’ I didn’t mind, for I knew that he was only flirting - indeed, it was rather pleasant to be flirted with by an old beau of Alice’s. Instead I asked him about the hall - about how it did, who he had had there, what they had sung. At the end of it he picked up a pen that lay on his desk, and began to fiddle with it. ‘And when are we to have Miss Butler back again?’ he asked. ‘I gather you and she’ve teamed up properly now.’ I stared, then felt my cheeks grow red; but he only meant, of course, the act: ‘I hear you’re working the halls together; and are quite a pair, by all accounts.’ Now I smiled. ‘How did you find that out? I am very quiet about it with my family.’ ‘I read the Era, don’t I? “Kitty Butler and Nan King”. I know a stage-name when I see one ...’ I laughed, ‘Oh, isn’t it funny, Tony? Isn’t it just the most marvellous thing? We are in Cinderella at the minute, at the Brit. Kitty’s the Prince, and I’m Dandini. I have to speak, sing, dance, slap my thigh, the works, in velvet breeches. And the crowd go mad for it!’ He smiled at my pleasure - it was lovely to be allowed to be pleased with myself, at last! - then shook his head. ‘Your folks, from what I’ve heard them say, don’t know the half of it. Why don’t you have them up to see you on the stage? Why the big secret?’ I shrugged, then hesitated; then, ‘Alice doesn’t care for Kitty ...’ I said. ‘And you and Kitty: you’re still in her pocket? You’re still struck with her like you always was?’ I nodded. He sniffed. ‘Then, she’s a lucky girl ...’ He seemed only to be flirting again; but I had the queerest impression, too, that he knew more than he was letting on - and didn’t care a fig about it. I answered, ‘I’m the lucky one,’ and held his gaze. He tapped with his pen again upon his blotter. ‘Maybe.’ Then he winked. I stayed at the Palace until it became rather obvious that Tony had other business to get on with, then took my leave of him. Once outside, I stood again before the foyer doors, reluctant to resign the reek of beer and grease-paint and confront the altogether different scents of Whitstable, our Parlour and our home.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It’s a fascinating story. Goshawks once bred across the British Isles. ‘There are divers Sorts and Sizes of Goshawks,’ wrote Richard Blome in 1618, ‘which are different in Goodness, force and hardiness according to the several Countries where they are Bred; but no place affords so good as those of Moscovy, Norway, and the North of Ireland, especially in the County of Tyrone.’ But the qualities of goshawks were forgotten with the advent of Land Enclosure, which limited the ability of ordinary folk to fly hawks, and the advent of accurate firearms that made shooting, rather than falconry, high fashion. Goshawks became vermin, not hunting companions. Their persecution by gamekeepers was the final straw for a goshawk population already struggling from habitat loss. By the late nineteenth century British goshawks were extinct. I have a photograph of the stuffed remains of one of the last birds to be shot; a black-and-white snapshot of a bird from a Scottish estate, draggled, stuffed and glassy-eyed. They were gone. But in the 1960s and 1970s, falconers started a quiet, unofficial scheme to bring them back. The British Falconers’ Club worked out that for the cost of importing a goshawk from the Continent for falconry, you could afford to bring in a second bird and release it. Buy one, set one free. It wasn’t a hard thing to do with a bird as self-reliant and predatory as a gos. You just found a forest and opened the box. Like-minded falconers started doing this all over Britain. The hawks came from Sweden, Germany and Finland: most were huge, pale, taiga forest gosses. Some were released on purpose. Some were simply lost. They survived, found each other and bred, secretly and successfully. Today their descendants number around four hundred and fifty pairs. Elusive, spectacular, utterly at home, the fact of these British goshawks makes me happy. Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  for the good of others.” When we reject passivity and lean into the needs around us, we see our minds set on the things of God. God is never passive. God is always working for our good and His glory. LIE: I can do whatever I want. TRUTH: God has set me free to serve others, not indulge myself. You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. 3 I CHOOSE TO SEEK THE GOOD OF OTHERS OVER MY OWN COMFORT. The Call to Action I think of Jesus using the parable to tell His disciples—and, by extension, us—to “stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning, and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks.” 4 Stay dressed for action! Keep your lamps burning! Be waiting for your master’s return! Which I’m guessing is different from the kind of waiting you and I typically do, in hopes of the pizza guy showing up soon. He went on—and here’s my actual point: “Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he [the master] will dress himself for service and have them [the servants] recline at table, and he will come and serve them.” 5 See, this is why that axiom of Jesus is true, that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” 6 When we are faithful to watch for opportunities to serve, when we live our lives at the ready for the Master’s call, we’re the ones who get served in the end. Our Master will actually tend to our every need. Why does it matter that we choose service instead of complacency? How does taking initiative for the good of others help us redirect our negative thoughts? What is in store for the person who serves consistently? Should we ever pay attention to our own problems, or are we supposed to just pretend those don’t exist? What if we’re tired? What if we’re overwhelmed? What if we don’t feel like doing good? Do we just fake it till we make it, or is there a more authentic path? As followers of Christ, we have to answer these questions for ourselves, because what we believe about work might be in opposition to God’s good and creative design for us.

• From Educated (2018)

  and a fossil. Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life. We visited the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, the Sistine Chapel. My instinct was to worship, to venerate. That was how I felt toward the whole city: that it should be behind glass, adored from a distance, never touched, never altered. My companions moved through the city differently, aware of its significance but not subdued by it. They were not hushed by the Trevi Fountain; they were not silenced by the Colosseum. Instead, as we moved from one relic to the next, they debated philosophy—Hobbes and Descartes, Aquinas and Machiavelli. There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing. On the third night there was a rainstorm. I stood on Nic’s balcony and watched streaks of lightning race across the sky, claps of thunder chasing them. It was like being on Buck’s Peak, to feel such power in the earth and sky. The next morning was cloudless. We took a picnic of wine and pastries to the grounds of the Villa Borghese. The sun was hot, the pastries ambrosial. I could not remember ever feeling more present. Someone said something about Hobbes, and without thinking I recited a line from Mill. It seemed the natural thing, to bring this voice from the past into a moment so saturated with the past already, even if the voice was mixed with my own. There was a pause while everyone checked to see who had spoken, then someone asked which text the line was from, and the conversation moved forward. For the rest of the week, I experienced Rome as they did: as a place of history, but also as a place of life, of food and traffic and conflict and thunder. The city was no longer a museum; it was as vivid to me as Buck’s Peak. The Piazza del Popolo. The Baths of Caracalla. Castel Sant’Angelo. These became as real to my mind as the Princess, the red railway car, the Shear. The world they represented, of philosophy, science, literature—an entire civilization—took on a life that was distinct from the life I had known. At the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, I stood before Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and did not once think about chickens.