Longing

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)

  Our sense of carpe diem was heightened by the fact that the world was coming to an end. A nuclear standoff with the Soviets had been building for weeks. The Soviets had three dozen missiles in Cuba, the United States wanted them out, and both sides had made their final offer. Negotiations were over and World War III was set to begin any minute. According to the newspapers, missiles would fall from the sky later today. Tomorrow at the latest. The world was Pompeii, and the volcano was already spitting ash. Ah well, everyone in the dive bars agreed, when humanity ends, this will be as good a place as any to watch the rising mushroom clouds. Aloha, civilization. And then, surprise, the world was spared. The crisis passed. The sky seemed to sigh with relief as the air turned suddenly crisper, calmer. A perfect Hawaiian autumn followed. Days of contentment and something close to bliss. Followed by a sharp restlessness. One night I set my beer on the bar and turned to Carter. “I think maybe the time has come to leave Shangri-La,” I said. I didn’t make a hard pitch. I didn’t think I had to. It was clearly time to get back to The Plan. But Carter frowned and stroked his chin. “Gee, Buck, I don’t know.” He’d met a girl. A beautiful Hawaiian teenager with long brown legs and jet-black eyes, the kind of girl who’d greeted our airplane, the kind I dreamed of having and never would. He wanted to stick around, and how could I argue? I told him I understood. But I was cast low. I left the bar and went for a long walk on the beach. Game over, I told myself. The last thing I wanted was to pack up and return to Oregon. But I couldn’t see traveling around the world alone, either. Go home, a faint inner voice told me. Get a normal job. Be a normal person. Then I heard another faint voice, equally emphatic. No, don’t go home. Keep going. Don’t stop. The next day I gave my two weeks’ notice at the boiler room. “Too bad, Buck,” one of the bosses said, “you had a real future as a salesman.” “God forbid,” I muttered. That afternoon, at a travel agency down the block, I purchased an open plane ticket, good for one year on any airline going anywhere. A sort of Eurail Pass in the sky. On Thanksgiving Day, 1962, I hoisted my backpack and shook Carter’s hand. “Buck,” he said, “don’t take any wooden nickels.” THE CAPTAIN ADDRESSED the passengers in rapid-fire Japanese, and I started to sweat. I looked out the window at the blazing red circle on the wing. Mom Hatfield was right, I thought. We were just at war with these people. Corregidor, the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking—and now I was going there on some sort of business venture? Crazy Idea? Maybe I was, in fact, crazy.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  39 This did not mean that he had accepted a new doctrinal truth; on the contrary, he had discovered that, like Socrates himself, he knew nothing at all. Socrates had made him realize that the value system by which he had lived was without foundation; as a result, in order to go forward authentically, his new self must be based on doubt (aporia ) rather than certainty. The type of wisdom that Socrates offered was not gained by acquiring items of knowledge but by learning to be in a different way. In our society, rational discussion is often aggressive, since participants are not usually battling with themselves but are doing their best to demonstrate the invalidity of their opponent’s viewpoint. This was the kind of debate that was going on in the Athenian assemblies, and Socrates did not like it. 40 He told the ambitious young aristocrat Meno that if he was one of the “clever and disputatious debaters” currently in vogue, he would simply state his case and challenge Meno to refute it. But this was not appropriate in a discussion between people who “are friends, as you and I are, and want to discuss with each other.” In true dialogue the interlocutors “must answer in a manner more gentle and more proper to discussion.” 41 In a Socratic dialogue, therefore, the “winner” did not try force an unwilling opponent to accept his point of view. It was a joint effort. You expressed yourself clearly as a gift to your partner, whose beautifully expressed argument would, in turn, touch you at a profound level. In the dialogues recorded by Plato, the conversation halts, digresses to another subject, and returns to the original idea in a way that prevents it from becoming dogmatic. It was essential that at each stage of the debate, Socrates and his interlocutors maintain a disciplined, openhearted accord. Because the Socratic dialogue was experienced as an initiation (myesis) , Plato used the language of the Mysteries to describe its effect on people. Socrates once said that, like his mother, he was a midwife whose task was to help his interlocutor engender a new self. 42 Like any good initiation, a successful dialogue should lead to ekstasis: by learning to inhabit each other’s point of view, the conversationalists were taken beyond themselves. Anybody who entered into dialogue with Socrates had to be willing to change; he had to have faith ( pistis ) that Socrates would guide him through the initial vertigo of aporia in such a way that he found pleasure in it. At the end of this intellectual ritual, if he had responded honestly and generously, the initiate would have become a philosopher, somebody who realized that he lacked wisdom, longed for it, but knew that he was not what he ought to be. Like a mystes , he had become “a stranger to himself.” This relentless search for wisdom made a philosopher atopos , “unclassifiable.”

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

  And at least I keep telling them their bedtime stories. Boston, April 1773. Along with scores of angry colonists, protesting the rise of import duties on their beloved tea, Matt and Travis History snuck aboard three ships in Boston Harbor and threw all the tea overboard… The minute their eyes were closed, I would sneak out of the room and settle into my recliner and reach for the phone. Hey, Dad. Yeah. How you doing?… Me? Not so good. Over the last ten years this had been my nightcap, my salvation. But now, more than ever, I lived for it. I craved things I could only get from my old man, though I’d have been hard-pressed to name them. Reassurance? Affirmation? Comfort? On December 9, 1977, I got them all, in a burst. Sports, of course, were the cause. The Houston Rockets were playing the Los Angeles Lakers that night. At the start of the second half, Lakers guard Norm Nixon missed a jumper, and his teammate Kevin Kunnert, a seven-foot beanpole out of Iowa, fought for the rebound with Houston’s Kermit Washington. In the tussle, Washington pulled down Kunnert’s shorts, and Kunnert retaliated with an elbow. Washington then socked Kunnert in the head. A fight broke out. As Houston’s Rudy Tomjanovich ran over to defend his teammates, Washington turned and threw a devastating haymaker, breaking Tomjanovich’s nose, and jaw, and separating his skull and facial bones from his skin. Tomjanovich fell to the floor as if hit with a shotgun blast. His massive body struck the ground with a sickening smack. The sound echoed throughout the upper reaches of the L.A. Forum, and for several seconds Tomjanovich lay there, motionless, in an ever-widening puddle of his own blood. I hadn’t heard anything about it until I talked to my father that night. He was breathless. I was surprised that he’d watched the game, but everyone in Portland was basketball crazy that year, because our Trail Blazers were the defending NBA champs. Still, it wasn’t the game, per se, that had him breathless. After telling me about the fight, he cried, “Oh, Buck, Buck, it was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen.” Then there was a long pause and he added, “The camera kept zooming in and you could see quite clearly… on Tomjanovich’s shoes… the swoosh! They kept zooming in on the swoosh.” I’d never heard such pride in my father’s voice. Sure, Tomjanovich was in a hospital fighting for his life, and sure his facial bones were floating around his head—but Buck Knight’s logo was in the national spotlight. That might have been the night the swoosh became real to my father. Respectable. He didn’t actually use the word “proud.” But I hung up the phone feeling as if he had. It almost makes this all worthwhile, I told myself. Almost.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  Given him up I had, indeed, completely, having never once heard from him since our separation; which, as I found afterwards, had been my misfortune, and not his neglect, for he wrote me several letters which had all miscarried; but forgotten him I never had. And amidst all my personal infidelities, not one had made a pin’s point impression on a heart impenetrable to the true love passion, but for him. As soon, however, as I was mistress of this unexpected fortune, I felt more than ever how dear he was to me, from its insufficiency to make me happy, whilst he was not to share it with me. My earliest care, consequently, was to endeavour at getting some account of him; but all my researches produced me no more light, than that his father had been dead for some time, not so well as even with the world; and that Charles had reached his port of destination in the South Seas, where, finding the estate he was sent to recover, dwindled to a trifle, by the loss of two ships in which the bulk of his uncle’s fortune lay, he was come away with the small remainder, and might, perhaps, according to the best advice, in a few months return to England, from whence he had, at the time of this my inquiry, been absent two years and seven months. A little eternity in love! You cannot conceive with what joy I embraced the hopes thus given me of seeing the delight of my heart again. But, as the term of months was assigned it, in order to divert and amuse my impatience for his return, after settling my affairs with much ease and security, I set out on a journey for Lancashire, with an equipage suitable to my fortune, and with a design purely to revisit my place of nativity, for which I could not help retaining a great tenderness; and might naturally not be sorry to shew myself there, to the advantage I was now in pass to do, after the report Esther Davis had spread of my being spirited away to the plantations; for on no other supposition could she account for the suppression of myself to her, since her leaving me so abruptly at the inn. Another favourite intention I had, to look out for my relations, though I had none but distant ones, and prove a benefactress to them. Then Mrs. Cole’s place of retirement lying in my way, was not amongst the least of the pleasures I had proposed to myself in this expedition. I had taken nobody with me but a discreet decent woman, to figure it as my companion, besides my servants; and was scarce got into an inn, about twenty miles from London, where I was to sup and pass the night, when such a storm of wind and rain come on, as made me congratulate myself on having got under shelter before it began.

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

  Something about my feet spoke to him. Something about my stride. Also, I afforded a wide margin of error. I wasn’t the best on the team, not by a long shot, so he could afford to make mistakes on me. With my more talented teammates he didn’t dare take undue chances. As a freshman, as a sophomore, as a junior, I lost count of how many races I ran in flats or spikes modified by Bowerman. By my senior year he was making all my shoes from scratch. Naturally I believed this new Tiger, this funny little shoe from Japan that had taken more than a full year to reach me, would intrigue my old coach. Of course, it wasn’t as light as his cod shoes. But it had potential: the Japanese were promising to improve it. Better yet, it was inexpensive. I knew this would appeal to Bowerman’s innate frugality. Even the shoe’s name struck me as something Bowerman might flip for. He usually called his runners “Men of Oregon,” but every once in a while he’d exhort us to be “tigers.” I can see him pacing the locker room, telling us before a race, “Be TIGERS out there!” (If you weren’t a tiger, he’d often call you a “hamburger.”) Now and then, when we bellyached about our skimpy prerace meal, he’d growl: “A tiger hunts best when he’s hungry.” With any luck, I thought, Coach will order a few pairs of Tigers for his tigers. But whether or not he placed an order, impressing Bowerman would be enough. That alone would constitute success for my fledgling company. It’s possible that everything I did in those days was motivated by some deep yearning to impress, to please, Bowerman. Besides my father there was no man whose approval I craved more, and besides my father there was no man who gave it less often. Frugality carried over to every part of the coach’s makeup. He weighed and hoarded words of praise, like uncut diamonds. After you’d won a race, if you were lucky, Bowerman might say: “Nice race.” (In fact, that’s precisely what he said to one of his milers after the young man became one of the very first to crack the mythical four-minute mark in the United States.) More likely Bowerman would say nothing. He’d stand before you in his tweed blazer and ratty sweater vest, his string tie blowing in the wind, his battered ball cap pulled low, and nod once. Maybe stare. Those ice-blue eyes, which missed nothing, gave nothing. Everyone talked about Bowerman’s dashing good looks, his retro crew cut, his ramrod posture and planed jawline, but what always got me was that gaze of pure violet blue. It got me on Day One. From the moment I arrived at the University of Oregon, in August 1955, I loved Bowerman. And feared him. And neither of these initial impulses ever went away, they were always there between us.

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

  That foggy morning, that momentous morning in 1962, I’d recently blazed my own trail—back home, after seven long years away. It was strange being home again, strange being lashed again by the daily rains. Stranger still was living again with my parents and twin sisters, sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night I’d lie on my back, staring at my college textbooks, my high school trophies and blue ribbons, thinking: This is me? Still? I moved quicker down the road. My breath formed rounded, frosty puffs, swirling into the fog. I savored that first physical awakening, that brilliant moment before the mind is fully clear, when the limbs and joints first begin to loosen and the material body starts to melt away. Solid to liquid. Faster, I told myself. Faster. On paper, I thought, I’m an adult. Graduated from a good college—University of Oregon. Earned a master’s from a top business school—Stanford. Survived a yearlong hitch in the U.S. Army—Fort Lewis and Fort Eustis. My résumé said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a twenty-four-year-old man in full… So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid? Worse, like the same shy, pale, rail-thin kid I’d always been. Maybe because I still hadn’t experienced anything of life. Least of all its many temptations and excitements. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette, hadn’t tried a drug. I hadn’t broken a rule, let alone a law. The 1960s were just under way, the age of rebellion, and I was the only person in America who hadn’t yet rebelled. I couldn’t think of one time I’d cut loose, done the unexpected. I’d never even been with a girl. If I tended to dwell on all the things I wasn’t, the reason was simple. Those were the things I knew best. I’d have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. Like all my friends I wanted to be successful. Unlike my friends I didn’t know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Wife? Kids? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them, instinctively. But deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all… different. I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win. No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose. And then it happened. As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me, exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play.

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

  (Later, I learned Woodell was doing the same thing.) That Thanksgiving a record cold spell hit Portland. The breeze coming through the holes in the office windows was now a fierce arctic wind. At times the gusts were so strong, papers flew from the desktops, shoelaces on the samples fluttered. The office was intolerable, but we couldn’t afford to fix the windows, and we couldn’t shut down. So Woodell and I moved to my apartment, and Miss Parks joined us there each afternoon. One day, after Woodell had gone home, neither Miss Parks nor I said much. At quitting time I walked her out to the elevator. I pressed the down button. We both smiled tensely. I pressed down again. We both stared at the light above the elevator doors. I cleared my throat. “Miss Parks,” I said. “Would you like to, uhh... maybe go out on Friday night?” Those Cleopatra eyes. They doubled in size. “Me?” “I don’t see anyone else here,” I said. Ping. The elevator doors slid open. “Oh,” she said, looking down at her feet. “Well. Okay. Okay.” She hurried onto the elevator, and as the doors closed she never lifted her gaze from her shoes. I TOOK HER to the Oregon Zoo. I don’t know why. I guess I thought walking around and gazing at animals would be a low-key way of getting to know each other. Also, Burmese pythons, Nigerian goats, African crocodiles, they would give me ample opportunities to impress her with tales of my travels. I felt the need to brag about seeing the pyramids, the Temple of Nike. I also told her about falling ill in Calcutta. I’d never described that scary moment, in detail, to anyone. I didn’t know why I was telling Miss Parks, except that Calcutta had been one of the loneliest moments of my life, and I felt very unlonely just then.

• From City of Night (1963)

  3 A woman in her late 30s walks past us. I had seen her many times before, usually about the men’s head. She had a pale white ghostface, her eyes outlined starkly in black. She never smiled. She would stand before some youngman—the rattiest looking and the youngest—then she’d whisper to him.... She was the only female score I knew of in the park. “She sure looks tired,” Chuck said as she passed by. Carried by the wave of the woman’s apparent lonesomeness, I asked Chuck abruptly: “Dont you ever get tired of this scene?” “Me? Uh—well—... Hell, yeah, man,” he said, “I am always tired.” He had misunderstood me. “Thats huccome I jes sit aroun.... But you wanna know somethin—? I sure wouldda dug being a cowboy.... An I was—once.” “In Georgia?” I couldn’t help saying. “Oh, no, man—thats where I was born .... But I always used to see those Western flix—an, man, those cowboys, they seemed to be having a ball all the time. Thats for me, I thought. Cause, see, I didnt wanna hassle it—I jes wanted to let whatever’s gonna come, come easy an jes the way it should. I figure a ranch is the best place to let it happen. I would imagine sitting there on a fence—an ridin on a horse, looking out at the miles of sand an sky, an nothin is gonna fuck it up. You jes wait—an that way nothin happens. Easy an slow. An then I figure: I’ll get me a horse, when I wanna cut up, an jes ride away, man, like that—you know.... Like—yeah—like you got Heaven roped by the neck.” I wonder at his vision of Heaven. Not clouds. Not angels. No.... But the wide, wide plains, great hills, and uncomplicated plain cupped in the warm embrace of the golden sun.... An endless stretching beyond the great soft hills... “See, I hitchhiked West the day after Ma an me went into town,” Chuck is saying. “This guy who gives me a ride, he says: ‘Where to, sonny?’ I says, ‘West!’... An thats where I went!” Again, his eyes search the park, as if wondering where the West of his imagination twisted into the West of Los Angeles. “This cat,” he goes on, “he says hes gonna go to Houston or Dallas—some place like that, I forget.... An we jes drive along. An then there it is, jes like in the movies: Man, jes miles an miles of plains an sky an more sky. Then I see these horses out the window. I tell the man, ‘Heres where I am goin.’ He says, ‘It’s the middle of nowhere, sonny.’ ‘Nowhere,’ I tole him, ‘thats where I wanna go.’... An I got outta that car, an I jes started running like I was crazy, hooting and howling.... An this one horse, hes left the others an hes comin straight at me. Straight at me!

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Maybe when I got home it would be sitting on my night table like it had never left. A nurse wheeled me through the hospital to the main doors where Isaac had parked his car. He walked slightly ahead of me. I watched his hands, the fat of his palm beneath his thumb. I was looking for traces of the book on his fingers. Stupid. If I wanted Nick’s words, I should have read them. Isaac’s hands were more than Nick’s book. They’d just reached into my body and cut out my cancer. But I couldn’t stop seeing the book in his hands, the way his fingers lifted the corner of the page before he turned it. He put on wordless music when we got in his car. That bothered me for some reason. Perhaps I expected him to have something new for me. I tapped my finger on the window as we drove. It was cold out. It would be like this for another few months before the weather would crack, and the sun would start to warm Washington. I liked the feel of the cold glass on my fingertips, like tiny shocks of winter. Isaac carried my bag inside. When I got to my room my eyes found my nightstand. There was a clear rectangle cut in the dust. I felt a pang of something. Grief? I was feeling a lot of grief; I had just lost my breasts. It had nothing to do with Nick, I told myself. “I’m making lunch,” Isaac said, standing just outside my room. “Do you want me to bring it up here?” “I want to shower. I’ll come down after.” He saw me staring at the bathroom door and cleared his throat. “Let me take a look before you do that.” I nodded and sat down on the edge of my bed, unbuttoning my shirt. When I was finished, I leaned back, my fingers gripping the comforter. You’d think I’d be used to this by now—the constant gawking and touching of my chest. Now that there was nothing there I should feel less ashamed. I was just a little boy as far as what was underneath my shirt. He unwound the bandages from my torso. I felt the air hit my skin and my eyes closed automatically. I opened them, defying my shame, to watch his face. Blank When he touched the skin around my sutures I wanted to pull back. “The swelling is down,” he said. “You can shower since the drain is out, but use the antibacterial soap I put in your bag. Don’t use a sponge on the stitches. They can snag.” I nodded. All things I knew, but when a man was looking at your mangled breasts he needed something to say. Doctor or not.

• From Educated (2018)

  I understood why. The sight of Tyler loading boxes into his car made me crazed. I wanted to scream but instead I ran, out the back door and up through the hills toward the peak. I ran until the sound of blood pulsing in my ears was louder than the thoughts in my head; then I turned around and ran back, swinging around the pasture to the red railroad car. I scrambled onto its roof just in time to see Tyler close his trunk and turn in a circle, as if he wanted to say goodbye but there was no one to say goodbye to. I imagined him calling my name and pictured his face falling when I didn’t answer. He was in the driver’s seat by the time I’d climbed down, and the car was rumbling down the dirt road when I leapt out from behind an iron tank. Tyler stopped, then got out and hugged me—not the crouching hug that adults often give children but the other kind, both of us standing, him pulling me into him and bringing his face close to mine. He said he would miss me, then he let me go, stepping into his car and speeding down the hill and onto the highway. I watched the dust settle. Tyler rarely came home after that. He was building a new life for himself across enemy lines. He made few excursions back to our side. I have almost no memory of him until five years later, when I am fifteen, and he bursts into my life at a critical moment. By then we are strangers. It would be many years before I would understand what leaving that day had cost him, and how little he had understood about where he was going. Tony and Shawn had left the mountain, but they’d left to do what my father had taught them to do: drive semis, weld, scrap. Tyler stepped into a void. I don’t know why he did it and neither does he. He can’t explain where the conviction came from, or how it burned brightly enough to shine through the black uncertainty. But I’ve always supposed it was the music in his head, some hopeful tune the rest of us couldn’t hear, the same secret melody he’d been humming when he bought that trigonometry book, or saved all those pencil shavings. —SUMMER WANED, SEEMING TO evaporate in its own heat. The days were still hot but the evenings had begun to cool, the frigid hours after sunset claiming more of each day. Tyler had been gone a month. I was spending the afternoon with Grandma-over-in-town. I’d had a bath that morning, even though it wasn’t Sunday, and I’d put on special clothes with no holes or stains so that, scrubbed and polished, I could sit in Grandma’s kitchen and watch her make pumpkin cookies. The autumn sun poured in through gossamer curtains and onto marigold tiles, giving the whole room an amber glow.

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

  Along with scores of angry colonists, protesting the rise of import duties on their beloved tea, Matt and Travis History snuck aboard three ships in Boston Harbor and threw all the tea overboard... The minute their eyes were closed, I would sneak out of the room and settle into my recliner and reach for the phone. Hey, Dad. Yeah. How you doing?... Me? Not so good. Over the last ten years this had been my nightcap, my salvation. But now, more than ever, I lived for it. I craved things I could only get from my old man, though I’d have been hard-pressed to name them. Reassurance? Affirmation? Comfort? On December 9, 1977, I got them all, in a burst. Sports, of course, were the cause. The Houston Rockets were playing the Los Angeles Lakers that night. At the start of the second half, Lakers guard Norm Nixon missed a jumper, and his teammate Kevin Kunnert, a seven-foot beanpole out of Iowa, fought for the rebound with Houston’s Kermit Washington. In the tussle, Washington pulled down Kunnert’s shorts, and Kunnert retaliated with an elbow. Washington then socked Kunnert in the head. A fight broke out. As Houston’s Rudy Tomjanovich ran over to defend his teammates, Washington turned and threw a devastating haymaker, breaking Tomjanovich’s nose, and jaw, and separating his skull and facial

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  What we see in the lives of animals are lessons we’ve learned from the world. A while ago, in a yellow tin chest in a college library, I found some photographs of White as a toddler. They’re silvered prints of a dusty Karachi landscape; a jandi tree, long shadows, a clear sky. In the first the boy sits on a donkey looking at the camera. He wears a loose shalwar kameez and a child’s sun hat, and his small round face has no interest in the donkey except for the fact that he is sitting on it. His mother stands behind him in impeccable Edwardian whites, looking beautiful and bored. In the second photograph the boy runs towards the camera over parched earth. He is running as fast as he can: his stubby arms are blurred as they swing, and the expression on his face, half-terror, half-delight, is something I’ve never seen on any other child. It is triumph that he has ridden the donkey, but relief that it is over. It is a face in desperate need of safety, with certain knowledge that there is none. There was none. His parents’ marriage was ill-starred from the first. Constance Aston had been nearly thirty when her mother’s jibes about the cost of keeping her became unbearable. ‘I’ll marry the next man who asks me,’ she snapped. The man was Garrick White, a District Commissioner of Police in Bombay. The newly-weds travelled to India, and as soon as Terence was born, Constance refused to sleep with her husband any more. He took to drink and the marriage toppled into violence. Five years later, the family came back to England to live for a while with Constance’s parents in the south-coast resort of St Leonards-on-Sea. When they returned to India they left the boy behind. It was an abandonment, but it was also a reprieve from fear. All that time was too beautiful for these words, was how White described his St Leonards life in a faintly fictionalised autobiographical fragment that in places breaks into his own, childish voice, the voice of a small boy desperate for attention and already desirous of transformation into other, safer selves: Look at me, Ruth, I am a pirate chief! Look, I am an aeroplane! Look, I am a polar bear! Look! Look! Look! There were puss-moth caterpillars, a tortoise, a storeroom with chocolate and sugar in jars, and endless games with his cousins.

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

  Whenever I go back to Eugene, and walk the campus, I think of her. Whenever I stand outside Hayward Field, I think of the silent race she ran. I think of all the many races that each of us have run. I lean against the fence and look at the track and listen to the wind, thinking of Bowerman with his string tie blowing behind him. I think of Pre, God love him. Turning, looking over my shoulder, my heart leaps. Across the street stands the William Knight Law School. A very serious-looking edifice. No one ever jackasses around in there. I CAN ’ T SLEEP. I can’t stop thinking about that blasted movie, The Bucket List. Lying in the dark, I ask myself again and again, What’s on yours? Pyramids? Check. Himalayas? Check. Ganges? Check. So… nothing? I think about the few things I want to do. Help a couple of universities change the world. Help find a cure for cancer. Besides that, it’s not so much things I want to do as things I’d like to say. And maybe unsay. It might be nice to tell the story of Nike. Everyone else has told the story, or tried to, but they always get half the facts, if that, and none of the spirit. Or vice versa. I might start the story, or end it, with regrets. The hundreds—maybe thousands—of bad decisions. I’m the guy who said Magic Johnson was “a player without a position, who’ll never make it in the NBA.” I’m the guy who tabbed Ryan Leaf as a better NFL quarterback than Peyton Manning. It’s easy to laugh those off. Other regrets go deeper. Not phoning Hiraku Iwano after he quit. Not getting Bo Jackson renewed in 1996. Joe Paterno. Not being a good enough manager to avoid layoffs. Three times in ten years—a total of fifteen hundred people. It still haunts. Of course, above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. Maybe, if I had, I could’ve solved the encrypted code of Matthew Knight. And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret—that I can’t do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I’d like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on. It’s all the same drive. The same dream. It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I’d tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling.

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

  1963 M y father invited all the neighbors over for coffee and cake and a special viewing of “Buck’s slides.” Dutifully, I stood at the slide projector, savoring the darkness, listlessly clicking the advance button and describing the pyramids, the Temple of Nike, but I wasn’t there. I was at the pyramids, I was at the Temple of Nike. I was wondering about my shoes. Four months after the big meeting at Onitsuka, after I’d connected with those executives, and won them over, or so I thought—and still the shoes hadn’t arrived. I fired off a letter. Dear Sirs, Re our meeting of last fall, have you had a chance to ship the samples…? Then I took a few days off, to sleep, wash my clothes, catch up with friends. I got a speedy reply from Onitsuka. “Shoes coming,” the letter said. “In just a little more days.” I showed the letter to my father. He winced. A little more days? “Buck,” he said, chuckling, “that fifty bucks is long gone.” MY NEW LOOK —castaway hair, caveman beard—was too much for my mother and sisters. I’d catch them staring, frowning. I could hear them thinking: bum. So I shaved. Afterward I stood before the little mirror on my bureau in the servants’ quarters and told myself, “It’s official. You’re back.” And yet I wasn’t. There was something about me that would never return. My mother noticed it before anyone else. Over dinner one night she gave me a long, searching look. “You seem more… worldly.” Worldly, I thought. Gosh. UNTIL THE SHOES arrived, whether or not the shoes ever arrived, I’d need to find some way to earn cash money. Before my trip I’d had that interview with Dean Witter. Maybe I could go back there. I ran it by my father, in the TV nook. He stretched out in his vinyl recliner and suggested I first go have a chat with his old friend Don Frisbee, CEO of Pacific Power & Light. I knew Mr. Frisbee. In college I’d done a summer internship for him. I liked him, and I liked that he’d graduated from Harvard Business School. When it came to schools, I was a bit of a snob. Also, I marveled that he’d gone on, rather quickly, to become CEO of a New York Stock Exchange company. I recall that he welcomed me warmly that spring day in 1963, that he gave me one of those double-handed handshakes and led me into his office, into a chair across from his desk. He settled into his big high-backed leather throne and raised his eyebrows. “So… what’s on your mind?” “Honestly, Mr. Frisbee, I don’t know what to do… about… or with… a job… or career…” Weakly, I added: “My life.” I said I was thinking of going to Dean Witter. Or else maybe coming back to the electric company. Or else maybe working for some large corporation. The light from Mr.

• From City of Night (1963)

  The pale face of a youngman who hands me a written note that says: “I’ll pay you $10.” I turn to answer him. He shakes his head, indicating hes a deafmute.... And about 20 minutes later Im back in the park again.... The bony face of the man driving a car around the block, stopping before me. Wordlessly I get in. Wordlessly we make it.... The face of the man who took me to his house in Evanston (and it was here that I had stopped on my way to New York, here that I had felt the restless compulsive anarchy those afternoons walking by the lake with my friend, now gone), and afterwards I explored that lake by the University: The waves thrust themselves against the darkened beach. Pinpoints of cigarette lights reveal the standing forms. I make it there.... The face with swallowing eyes of the man who follows me out of the Cavern. “You dont have to do anything—just stand,” he says.... The faces of two youngmen I think at first are also hustling the park. One is a dancer. I score from both, separately, and the dancer gives me several telephone numbers. But I dont call them: The city—its streets, park, beach—invites me luringly.... The face of an oldish man in sandals—and he warns me against clipping him: “Thats so cheap!—so I must ask you: Please—dont—clip—me!”... The perspiring face of the man who takes me to an Italian fair, where we’re surrounded by dark faces. And he mops his brow and says: “Well, it’s all right to read about teeming humanity—but to be surrounded by it!”—as he pushes his way anxiously out of the fair.... The calculating face of the man I think I’ll score from easily; who says: “Youre asking too much. I always smile at you guys, when youre new in town and it’s still summer. I just wait for winter—then I can get anyone for hardly anything!...” And the sad face of the score who thanks me afterwards and sighs: “I guess I’ll never see you again. The nice ones just disappear—so quickly. It’s the mean ones (oh, I get so mad!) that keep coming back like we owe them a living!” The faces drinking beer at the place of a queen whos picked me up—faces there of three youngmen picked up by the queen’s roommate. And released by the beer, the scene turns into a melée of bodies.... And the others not now remembered. And that search to find some immediate redemptive something to expunge what was discovered in San Francisco took me to the mangled sights of Chicago’s hobo jungles. Madison Street. The enormous Kemper Insurance Building—a huge gray ugly building a block square along the river. Looming darkly. More than 40 stories high. A great bulwark, a fortress. A large square area windowless—Blind. Almost symbolically it turns its back arrogantly to the west side of Madison. Cross the bridge.

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

  I winced. I knew I had two strikes against me, but I didn’t realize climbing Mount Fuji was one of them. What was so bad about climbing Mount Fuji? “How did you get away?” I asked. “My brother. He snuck me out of the house early this morning and drove me to the airport.” I wondered if she really loved me, or just saw me as a chance to rebel. DURING THE DAY, while I was busy working on Blue Ribbon stuff, Sarah would hang out with my mother. At night she and I would go downtown for dinner and drinks. On the weekend we skied Mount Hood. When it was time for her to return home, I was bereft again.Dear Sarah, I miss you. I love you. She wrote back right away. She missed me, too. She loved me, too. Then, with the winter rains, there was a slight cooling in her letters. They were less effusive. Or so I thought. Maybe it’s just my imagination, I told myself. But I had to know. I phoned her. It wasn’t my imagination. She said she’d given it a lot of thought and she wasn’t sure we were right for each other. She wasn’t sure I was sophisticated enough for her. “Sophisticated,” that was the word she used. Before I could protest, before I could negotiate, she hung up. I took out a piece of paper and typed her a long letter, begging her to reconsider. She wrote back right away. No sale. THE NEW SHIPMENT of shoes arrived from Onitsuka. I could hardly bring myself to care. I spent weeks in a fog. I hid in the basement. I hid in the servants’ quarters. I lay on my bed and stared at my blue ribbons. Though I didn’t tell them, my family knew. They didn’t ask for details. They didn’t need them, or want them. Except my sister Jeanne. While I was out one day she went into the servants’ quarters and into my desk and found Sarah’s letters. Later, when I came home and went down to the basement, Jeanne came and found me. She sat on the floor beside me and said she’d read the letters, all of them, carefully, concluding with the final rejection. I looked away. “You’re better off without her,” Jeanne said. My eyes filled with tears. I nodded thanks. Not knowing what to say, I asked Jeanne if she’d like to do some part-time work for Blue Ribbon. I was pretty far behind, and I could sure use some help. “Since you’re so interested in mail,” I said hoarsely, “maybe you’d enjoy doing some secretarial work. Dollar and a half an hour?” She chuckled. And thus my sister became the first-ever employee of Blue Ribbon.

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

  Then he’d airmail his notes and findings to Japan. Eventually he broke through. Onitsuka made prototypes that conformed to Bowerman’s vision of a more American shoe. Soft inner sole, more arch support, heel wedge to reduce stress on the Achilles tendon—they sent the prototype to Bowerman and he went wild for it. He asked for more. He then handed these experimental shoes out to all his runners, who used them to crush the competition. A little success always went to Bowerman’s head, in the best way. Around this time he was also testing sports elixirs, magic potions and powders to give his runners more energy and stamina. When I was on his team he’d talked about the importance of replacing an athlete’s salt and electrolytes. He’d forced me and others to choke down a potion he’d invented, a vile goo of mushed bananas, lemonade, tea, honey, and several unnamed ingredients. Now, while tinkering with shoes, he was also monkeying with his sports drink recipe, making it taste worse and work better. It wasn’t until years later that I realized Bowerman was trying to invent Gatorade. In his “free time,” he liked to noodle with the surface at Hayward Field. Hayward was hallowed ground, steeped in tradition, but Bowerman didn’t believe in letting tradition slow you down. Whenever rain fell, which it did all the time in Eugene, Hayward’s cinder lanes turned to Venetian canals. Bowerman thought something rubbery would be easier to dry, sweep, and clean. He also thought something rubbery might be more forgiving on his runners’ feet. So he bought a cement mixer, filled it with old shredded tires and assorted chemicals, and spent hours searching for just the right consistency and texture. More than once he made himself violently sick from inhaling the fumes of this witches’ brew. Blinding headaches, a pronounced limp, loss of vision—these were a few of the lasting costs of his perfectionism. Again, it was years before I realized what Bowerman was actually up to. He was trying to invent polyurethane. I once asked him how he fit everything into a twenty-four-hour day. Coaching, traveling, experimenting, raising a family. He grunted as if to say, “It’s nothing.” Then he told me, sotto voce, that on top of everything else, he was also writing a book. “A book?” I said. “About jogging,” he said gruffly. Bowerman was forever griping that people make the mistake of thinking only elite Olympians are athletes. But everyone’s an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re an athlete. Now he was determined to get this point across to a larger audience. The reading public. “Sounds interesting,” I said, but I thought my old coach had popped a screw. Who in heck would want to read a book about jogging?

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I watch the condor for a while. It makes me impatient. My head is packed with real skies and real hawks. I’m remembering live condors I’d met at a captive-breeding centre years before: vast, loose-feathered, turkey-necked birds with purpose and curiosity; avian hogs in black feather-boas. Precious, yes, but complicated, real, idiosyncratic, astonishing. The condor on the gallery screen was nothing like them. Helen, you are an idiot, I think. That is the whole point of this exhibition. The whole point of it, right there in front of you. I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing – not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss? There is a vast difference between my visceral, bloody life with Mabel and the reserved, distanced view of modern nature-appreciation. I know that some of my friends see my keeping a hawk as morally suspect, but I couldn’t love or understand hawks as much as I do if I’d only ever seen them on screens. I’ve made a hawk part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk’s, and it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me. I think of my chastened surprise when Mabel played with a paper telescope. She is real. She can resist the meanings humans give her. But the condor? The condor has no resistance to us at all. I stare at the attenuated, drifting image on the gallery screen. It is a shadow, a figure of loss and hope; it is hardly a bird at all. The other exhibit is perfectly simple. It is a bird lying on its back in a glass box in an empty room. Seeing it makes all my soapbox musings fade and fall away. It’s a parrot, a Spix’s macaw. There are none left in the wild now and the last captive birds are the focus of desperate attempts to keep the species alive. This one is long dead. Stuffed with cotton wool, a small paper label tied to one of its clenched dry feet, its feathers are the deep blue of an evening sea. It might be the loneliest thing I have ever seen. But leaning over this spotlit skin in a glass coffin, I don’t think of animal extinction at all. I think of Snow White. I think of Lenin in his ill-lit mausoleum. And I think of the day after my father died, when I was shown into a hospital room where he lay.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Night falls. The Wart sleeps under a tree, and the next morning he comes across a high-gabled stone cottage in a clearing in the wood. Outside it, drawing water from a well, is a tall elderly man with spectacles and a long white beard, wearing a gown splashed with mutes and embroidered with stars and leaves and mystical signs. It is his teacher, Merlyn the magician, and when the Wart walks into his cottage he finds it is a treasury of wonderful things: thousands of books, stuffed birds, live grass snakes in an aquarium, baby badgers, an owl called Archimedes. There is Venetian glass, a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, paint-boxes, fossils, a bottle of Mastic varnish, purse-nets and rabbit-wires, a rod-box, salmon flies, and a fox’s mask mounted on the wall. Nearly all of these things were in White’s cottage as he wrote. The book was White’s ‘Kingdom of Grammerie’, wrote Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘where there was room and redress for anything he liked to put in it’. But there is another way of reading this scene, one far less mundane than a writer’s amusement at putting in his book the things around him as he writes: it is that Merlyn’s cottage in the woods is his own. On White’s shelves were a whole clutch of books on human psychology. He’d read them, underlined passages, made notes in the margins on the pathology of sexual deviance. In Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology he’d found a whole chapter on homosexuality. It held that the attitude of homosexuals was ‘that of people desirous of interfering with the flight of time’. Adler thought homosexuals were irresponsible because they refused to develop into heterosexual adulthood. But interfering with the flight of time? Words once read run deep.

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

  The impact of Miss Parks was most apparent in Woodell. He was going through a bad time just then. His body was fighting the wheelchair, resisting its life imprisonment. He was plagued by bedsores and other maladies related to sitting motionless, and often he’d be out sick for weeks at a time. But when he was in the office, when he was sitting alongside Miss Parks, she brought the color back to his cheeks. She had a healing effect on him, and seeing this had a bewitching effect on me. Most days I surprised myself, offering eagerly to run across the street to get lunch for Miss Parks and Woodell. This was the kind of thing we might have asked Miss Parks to do, but day after day I volunteered. Was it chivalry? Devilry? What was happening to me? I didn’t recognize myself. And yet some things never change. My head was so full of debits and credits, and shoes, shoes, shoes, that I rarely got the lunch orders right. Miss Parks never complained. Nor did Woodell. Invariably I’d hand each of them a brown paper bag and they’d exchange a knowing glance. “Can’t wait to see what I’m eating for lunch today,” Woodell would mutter. Miss Parks would put a hand over her mouth, concealing a smile. Miss Parks saw my bewitchment, I think. There were several long looks between us, several meaningfully awkward pauses. I recall one burst of particularly nervous laughter, one portentous silence. I remember one long moment of eye contact that kept me awake that night. Then it happened. On a cold afternoon in late November, when Miss Parks wasn’t in the office, I was walking toward the back of the office and noticed her desk drawer open. I stopped to close it and inside I saw… a stack of checks? All her paychecks—uncashed. This wasn’t a job to her. This was something else. And so perhaps… was I? Maybe? Maybe. (Later, I learned Woodell was doing the same thing.) That Thanksgiving a record cold spell hit Portland. The breeze coming through the holes in the office windows was now a fierce arctic wind. At times the gusts were so strong, papers flew from the desktops, shoelaces on the samples fluttered. The office was intolerable, but we couldn’t afford to fix the windows, and we couldn’t shut down. So Woodell and I moved to my apartment, and Miss Parks joined us there each afternoon. One day, after Woodell had gone home, neither Miss Parks nor I said much. At quitting time I walked her out to the elevator. I pressed the down button. We both smiled tensely. I pressed down again. We both stared at the light above the elevator doors. I cleared my throat. “Miss Parks,” I said. “Would you like to, uhh… maybe go out on Friday night?” Those Cleopatra eyes. They doubled in size. “Me?” “I don’t see anyone else here,” I said. Ping. The elevator doors slid open.