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)

  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 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)

  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 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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Despite the eccentricity of a hawk on his fist, what White was doing was very much of his time. Long walks in the English countryside, often at night, were astonishingly popular in the 1930s. Rambling clubs published calendars of full moons, train companies laid on mystery trains to rural destinations, and when in 1932 the Southern Railway offered an excursion to a moonlit walk along the South Downs, expecting to sell forty or so tickets, one and a half thousand people turned up. The people setting out on these walks weren’t seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour: to Merrie England, or to pre-historic England, pre-industrial visions that offered solace and safety to sorely troubled minds. For though railways and roads and a burgeoning market in countryside books had contributed to this movement, at heart it had grown out of the trauma of the Great War, and was flourishing in fear of the next. The critic Jed Esty has described this pastoral craze as one element in a wider movement of national cultural salvage in these years; it was a response to economic disaster, a contracting Empire and totalitarian threats from abroad. It was a movement that celebrated ancient sites and folk traditions. It delighted in Shakespeare and Chaucer, in Druids, in Arthurian legend. It believed that something essential about the nation had been lost and could be returned, if only in the imagination. White, caught up in this conservative, antiquarian mood, walked with his hawk and wrote of ghosts, of starry Orion naked and resplendent in the English sky, of all the imaginary lines men and time had drawn upon the landscape. By the fire, his hawk by his side, he brooded on the fate of nations.

• From Educated (2018)

  Unwilling to suffer a humiliating defeat, cut down one by one as they tried to break through the cavalry, they mounted their horses and charged off the face of the mountain. When the Apache women found their broken bodies on the rocks below, they cried huge, desperate tears, which turned to stone when they touched the earth. Grandma never told us what happened to the women. The Apaches were at war but had no warriors, so perhaps she thought the ending too bleak to say aloud. The word “slaughter” came to mind, because slaughter is the word for it, for a battle when one side mounts no defense. A slaughter was the likely outcome of the warriors’ bravery. They died in heroic thunder; their wives in collective silence. A void in the shared history, a blank page. As we drove to the trailer, the sun dipping in the sky, its last rays reaching across the highway, I thought about the Apache women. Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the armies assembled, before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by their attachers, by the women themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone. —I HAD NEVER BEFORE left the mountain and I ached for it, for the sight of the Princess etched in pine across the massif. I found myself glancing at the vacant Arizona sky, hoping to see her black form swelling out of the earth, laying claim to her half of the heavens. But she was not there. More than the sight of her, I missed her caresses—the wind she sent through canyons and ravines to sweep through my hair every morning. In Arizona, there was no wind. There was just one heat-stricken hour after another. I spent my days wandering from one side of the trailer to the other, then out the back door, across the patio, over to the hammock, then around to the front porch, where I’d step over Dad’s semiconscious form and back inside again. It was a great relief when, on the sixth day, Grandpa’s four-wheeler broke down and Tyler and Luke took it apart to find the trouble. I sat on a large barrel of blue plastic, watching them, wondering when we could go home. When Dad would stop talking about the Illuminati. When Mother would stop leaving the room whenever Dad entered it. That night after dinner, Dad said it was time to go. “Get your stuff,” he said. “We’re hitting the road in half an hour.” It was early evening, which Grandma said was a ridiculous time to begin a twelve-hour drive.

• From City of Night (1963)

  He was an Oklahoma cowboy, discovered on the range—who came to the newyork Rodeo (I am not referring to the one in Madison Square Garden: Im referring to the Rodeo of this city itself), and whom I was able—my lucky star was shining—to corral in my own small patio—sadly not large enough for him who was used to The Plains—but briefly, briefly, I had that earthangel, but the bronco god called him, and off he galloped: to the vaster plains of Broadway—and I heard later he changed his name to Cam Rider—rather, the agent who Sponsored him changed it; the agent was fond of saying: ‘He jes cam’ ridin into my life.’... How could the good assistant, with all his science, have indicated Cam Rider, née Joe Jones, on his graph? Impossible!... And at the party which these two youngmen gave to entertain the assistant (although he would not have called it ‘entertainment’—it was always Material! Research! Study! Science!)—at that party, he would ask for specific performances. I must say the boys in the group had never had such a marvelous time—with no fear of a raid, since the assistant was well protected: And thus, in the future, you will see life imitating science!... It was after Robbie had left that I went to that party. I saw Robbie after that magic first night, at different places, but I could not afford him. Once I had given him $25.00, I couldnt give him less. I wasnt—let me again remind you—doing well—uh—‘breadwise,’ then: It was a dry period: And I thought that Heaven had allowed me only that brief time with Robbie. And then one day he called me: My Robbie! ‘Professor,’ he said, ‘can I come up?’ My heart died to speak the next words: ‘Angel-child,’ I said, ‘I cannot afford you at the moment—in fact, the memory of you is so precious to me, that I cannot even afford that—but it is one of those rare prizes of life that memories have no price!’ And then, after a brief wordless interlude in which my heart refused to budge, my guardian Angel sighed into the telephone: ‘Professor, havent you ever heard of love?’ ... I had never dared to hope—me, a mountain of spent flesh—and that supple magnificent youngman.... And yet there it was: The Word: The Magic Word: Love.... I called up a friend of mine—for once, I was not too proud. I needed money badly, I told him. That afternoon, when Robbie came over, I gave him $100.00. He looked hurt when I gave it to him. ‘This was for love,’ he told me. ‘Child,’ I told him, ‘Robbie—Angel—the money is also an inadequate expression of my Love.’ And I pressed it into his hand.... Ah! if indeed it were possible to shatter this sorry scheme of things—I would begin by replacing that first sharp slap which brings us howling into life—I would replace it... with a Kiss.... I would breathe Love into each child....

• 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.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The poet W. H. Auden had written those lines in 1930, and I hadn’t thought of them for years. To have the commanding view of the hawk and airman: to be lifted free from the messy realities of human life to a prospect of height and power from which one can observe the world below. To have safe vantage, from which death may descend. Safety. I think of the American airmen stationed here seventy years ago flying aircraft just like this one, scrambling to the iceboxes that were cockpits, wearing heated suits that didn’t work, breathing oxygen through rubber hoses that furred with crystalline ice, so that at altitude they had to bend and crush them between their fingers to get sufficient oxygen to breathe. They slept on cots in an alien land of rain and fog, dressed in silence for dawn briefings before running to their ships, holding the throttles forward, tight-chested as the engines spooled up, climbing through cloud, eyes locked on the manifold pressure gauges and the rpm displays, navigators calling headings in degrees. And then the hours of flight to and from Germany where they dropped their appalling cargo through skies thick with exploding shells. One in four did not complete their tour of duty. The sky was not a place of safety, no matter how commanding their view. What happened to them was terrible. What they did was terrible beyond imagining. No war can ever be just air. The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives’ ends. She finishes the last scraps of rabbit, strops her beak, rubs strands of pale fur onto the glove. Then she shakes her feathers into place and gazes up at the empty sky where the bomber had been. And I feel it then, the tug. How did Auden’s poem go, after those lines? The clouds rift suddenly – look there I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk’s eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And so, with Eminent contiadictions (I must warn you), the wayward saga of Miss Destiny unfolds—that night at the 1-2-3, in the ocean of searching faces: “Naturally,” she continued, “I got into the Finest circles. Philadelphia society and all that—and Im sippin muh cocktail at this party when in walks the most positively gorgeous youngman I have evuh seen. And he stares at me! Walked away from the hostess—who was a real lady (a society model, baby, and later she became a Moviestar and married that king—you know)—” muttering bitch after Pauline who just then passed brushing my shoulder purposely to bug Miss Destiny “—and this gorgeous youngman, why, he comes to me and says—just like that—‘You Are My Destiny!’ and I thought he said, ‘You are Miss Destiny,’ mistaking me you know for some other girl, and when the hostess says Im the most beautiful fish shes evuh seen, what is my name, Im terrified the gorgeous youngman will drop me if Im not who I think he thinks I am, so I say, ‘I am Miss Destiny,’ and he thinks I said, ‘I am his destiny’ (he told me later), and he says, ‘Yes oh yes she is,’ and from then on ‘I am Miss Destiny—” (Oh they go home that night and Miss Destiny must confess she is not a real woman, but, oh, oh, he doesnt care, having of course flipped over her, and he takes her to his country estate, his family naturally being Fabulously rich, and they simply Idolize Miss Destiny....) “His name was Duke,” Miss Destiny sighed, “and when I met him, oh I remember, they were playing La Varsouviana (thats ‘Put Your Little Foot,’ dear)—you see, although it was a cocktail party, it was so Elegant that they had an orchestra—and how I loved him, and I know thats a strange name—Duke—but it was his real name, not a nickname—but he would be a wild rose by any other name and smell as sweet!... Being aristocrats, all his family had strange names: his mother’s name was ah Alexandria, just like the ah queen of ah ancient Sparta who killed the ah emperor in Greek mythology (those are very old stories, dear)—” Suddenly here is Darling Dolly Dane back gasping tugging at Miss Destiny, who of course resents the intrusion in the middle of her autobiography. “Destiny, Destiny, quick,” Darling Dolly pleads, “Ive got to have the key to your pad right away quick hurry!” I notice Darling Dolly is carrying a small bundle that looks suspiciously like a pair of pants. All right, all right—and what does Darling Dolly want the key for? Darling Dolly Dane says she just clipped the score she went with who promised her the deuce, remember?

• From City of Night (1963)

  Between them was a very young, handsome boy, his shirt open to the waist. One of the woman’s arms was draped proudly about the boy’s shoulders; the other hand held a bottle of wine toward the camera.)... “This is for the last,” the Professor said, skipping a page, bringing the book to his chest momentarily; goes on: “And this is the most poetic of my poetic angels—he wrote the Most Divine, sensitive poems—crystals!—I helped him to get a grant—not through any foundation, mind you, but part of mine: My life’s source at that time thus contributing to his.” (The youngman in the picture wore his hair poetically over his forehead.) “He was a beautiful poet—” the Professor sighed, “and when I told him I would help him, he told me, passionately, that he would dedicate his first volume to me. Ive wondered if it came out.... Danny, the ice-skater: He glided across my not-so-icy heart.... And this one!—a Mr America candidate!” (The body in the photograph gleamed coldly as if chiseled out of ice.)... There were other photographs—youngmen in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, America... several sailors, servicemen, various youngmen in trunks: all staring at the world with a look strangely in common: a look which at first I thought was a coldness behind the smile and then realized must be a kind of muted despair, a franticness to get what the world had offered others and not extended readily to them.... And now the Professor turns back to the page he had skipped. I knew whom the picture would be of: “This—Is—Robbie,” he announced. (I saw a handsome youngman sitting on a foreign car, squinting at the sun, smiling widely as if someday he would own the world; as if the world for him was a mirror. But even in the picture he seemed to resent the brightness of the sun, greater than his own.) “I have here,” the Professor sighed, hugging the album closely again, “the indefinable shape of love—to which, dear child, you must not deny my adding your photograph....” I wondered suddenly if. I would photograph with the same hard look.... I remember Mr King: “Pictures in a fuckedup album.”) “Yes, Love, indeed,” the Professor said, “which has many forms. Who loved the most? I? They? Who was the taker, who the giver? Who can tell? Someday—at the last of my Research—I shall know.... Now,” he said, “take the chair and come stand near me—please....” I placed the album under the heavy book with the Professor’s name on the cover. I could feel the bulging eyes on me as I lifted the book, slipped the album under it on the shelf. I went and stood by the bed. When I was ready to leave, the Professor waved as usual. Again he sighed after me: “God Is Love!” Outside, the malenurse stared frozenly at me.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  No, I shall go on my own.’ I said it rather firmly, as if going to the Palace every night was some chore I had been set to do and I had generously decided to do it with the minimum of bother and complaint. There was a second’s almost awkward silence. Then Father said, ‘You are a funny little thing, Nancy. All the way to Canterbury in the sweltering heat - and not even to wait for a glimpse of Gully Sutherland when you get there!’ And at that, everybody laughed, and the second’s awkwardness passed, and the conversation turned to other things. There were more cries of disbelief, however, and more smiles, when I came home from my third trip to the Palace and announced, shyly, my intention of returning there a fourth time, and a fifth. Uncle Joe was visiting us: he was pouring beer from a bottle, carefully, into a tilted glass, but looked up when he heard the laughter. ‘What’s all this?’ he said. ‘Nancy’s mashed out on that Kitty Butler, at the Palace,’ said Davy. ‘Imagine that, Uncle Joe - being mashed on a masher!’ I said, ‘You shut up.’ Mother looked sharp. ‘You shut up, please, madam.’ Uncle Joe took a sip of his beer, then licked the froth from his whiskers. ‘Kitty Butler?’ he said. ‘She’s the gal what dresses up as a feller, ain’t she?’ He pulled a face. ‘Pooh, Nancy, the real thing not good enough for you any more?’ Father leaned towards him. ‘Well, we are told it is Kitty Butler,’ he said. ‘If you ask me’ - and here he winked and rubbed his nose - ‘I think there’s a young chap in the orchestra pit what she’s got her eye on ...’ ‘Ah,’ said Joe, significantly. ‘Let’s hope poor Frederick don’t catch on to it, then ...’ At that, everybody looked my way, and I blushed - and so seemed, I suppose, to prove my father’s words. Davy snorted; Mother, who had frowned before, now smiled. I let her - I let them all think just what they liked - and said nothing; and soon, as before, the talk turned to other matters. I could deceive my parents and my brother with my silences; from my sister Alice, however, I could keep nothing. ‘Is there a feller you’ve got your eye on, at the Palace?’ she asked me later, when the rest of the house lay hushed and sleeping. ‘Of course not,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s just Miss Butler, then, that you go to see?’ ‘Yes.’ There was a silence, broken only by the distant rumble of wheels and faint thud of hooves, from the High Street, and the even fainter sucking whoosh of sea against shingle from the bay. We had put out our candle but left the window wide and unshuttered. I saw in the gleam of starlight that Alice’s eyes were open.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I saw and heard it all, now, because - it was the very reason that had kept me blind and deaf to it before! - because his passion was my own, which I had long grown used to thinking unremarkable, and right. I almost pitied him; I almost loved him. I did not hate him - or if I did, it was only as one loathes the looking-glass, that shows one one’s imperfect form in strict and fearful clarity. Nor did I now begin to resent his presence on those strolls and visits that I should otherwise have made with Kitty on my own. He was my rival, of sorts; but in some queer way it was almost easier to love her in his company, than out of it. His presence gave me a licence to be bold and gay and sentimental, as he was; to be able to pretend to worship her - which was almost as good as being able to worship her in earnest. And if I still longed yet feared to hold her - well, as I have said, the fact that Walter felt the same showed that both my reticence and my love were only natural and proper. She was a star - my private star - and I would be content, I thought, like Walter, to fly about her on my stiff and distant orbit, unswervingly, for ever. I could not know how soon we would collide, nor how dramatically. By now it was December - a cold December to match the sweltering August, so cold that the little skylight above our staircase at Ma Dendy’s was thick with ice for days at a time; so cold that when we woke in the mornings our breath showed grey as smoke, and we had to pull our petticoats into bed with us and dress beneath the sheets. At home in Whitstable we hated the cold, because it made the trawler-men’s job so much the harder. I remember my brother Davy sitting at our parlour fire on January evenings, and weeping, simply weeping with pain, as the life returned to his split and frozen hands, his chilblained feet. I remember the ache in my own fingers as I handled pail after frigid pail of winter oysters, and transferred fish, endlessly, from icy seawater to steaming soup. At Mrs Dendy’s, however, everybody loved the winter months; and the colder they were, they said, the better. Because frosts, and chill winds, fill theatres. For many Londoners a ticket to the music hall is cheaper than a scuttle of coal - or, if not cheaper, then more fun: why stay in your own miserable parlour stamping and clapping to keep the cold out when you can visit the Star or the Paragon, and stamp and clap along with your neighbours - and with Marie Lloyd as an accompaniment?

• From City of Night (1963)

  He couldnt understand what I had received from Robbie, my Robbie. But Martin is not a very perceptive person: His books are searchlights on the facts of our world—but cold, too, like searchlights. And where his heart should be, there is a novel.... I wish that were original but it is not: A psychiatrist said that to him once, who, incidently—how shall I say it and be modest?— “was intrigued” by me. He—the psychiatrist—persuaded me to let him give me the Rorschach test—to test my subconscious!—and I let him—on a lark. I looked at one of the inkblots, and he said, “‘What do you see?’ I answered, ‘I see you , trying to see me! ’... And that reminds me of a young assistant to the good Dr. Kinsey. The assistant didnt fool me a second; he was a professional voyeur. Do you know what that is, my dear young angel? A watcher! Science—oh, yes—truly—he was most dedicated to the science of Sexology.... Countess von Braun was fond of saying: ‘If Sex is a science, its only laboratory is the Bedroom!’ ...I introduced the young assistant to two charming youngmen I knew (one of them gained a certain notoriety by playing the naked sailor in the musical Island Paradise ), and the assistant Expressed An Interest in seeing one of their ‘wild parties’—for The Research.... Shall I amuse you?... Well! These boys were not that kind —they were very quiet lovers—and I do not mean any trace of contempt when I say ‘that kind’—it is a most extraordinary kind, that kind. Anyway, the assistant was so insistent (The Insistent Assistant!) that they decided to ‘stage’ a wild party for him. And they did. It was incredible! The good assistant kept moving from room to room, watching—and, child, it was more than the glimmer of scientific discovery that shone in the good assistant’s eyes!... He asked to interview me, for The Book, but I told him my affairs with the angels are too precious to reduce them to lines on a graph! For example, how could he have indicated on a graph what Joe Jones (it was part of his distinction that he had such a common name—at first)—what Joe Jones meant to me? He was definitely an earthangel—and is there a graph for such a breed?...

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I pulled at a thread that had come loose at my cuff. ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ I said quietly, ‘to have a tidy house. I thought -’ I had thought that it would make her like me. In Diana’s world, it would have. It, or something similar. ‘I liked my house the way it was,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you,’ I replied; and then, when she hesitated, I said - what, I suppose, I had been planning to say to her, all along - ‘Let me stay, Miss Banner! Oh, please let me stay!’ She gave me a bewildered look. ‘Miss Astley, I cannot!’ ‘I could sleep in here, like I did last night. I could clean and cook, like I did today. I could do your washing.’ I was growing more rash and desperate as I spoke. ‘Oh, how I longed to do those things, when I was in the house in St John’s Wood! But that devil I lived with said I must let the servants do it - that it would spoil my hands. But if I stayed here - well, I could look after your little boy while you are at work. I wouldn’t give him laudanum when he cried!’ Now Florence’s eyes were wider than ever. ‘Clean and do my washing? Look after Cyril? I’m sure I couldn’t let you do all those things!’ ‘Why not? I met fifty women in your street today, all doing exactly those things! It’s natural, ain’t it? If I was your wife - or Ralph’s wife, I mean - I should certainly do them then.’ Now she folded her arms. ‘In this house, Miss Astley, that’s possibly the very worst argument you could have hit upon.’ As she spoke, however, the front door opened and Ralph appeared. He had an evening paper under one arm, and Cyril under the other. ‘My word,’ he said, ‘look at the shine on this step! I am frightened to tread on it.’ He saw me and smiled - ‘Hallo, still here?’ - then he glanced about the room. ‘And look at all this! I haven’t come into the wrong parlour, have I?’ Florence stepped across to him to take the baby, then propelled him out towards the kitchen. Here I heard him exclaiming very warmly - first over Annie, and then over the beef and potatoes, and finally over the pineapple. Florence struggled with Cyril for a moment: he was squirming and fractious and about to cry. I went to her, and - with terrible boldness, for the last baby I had held had been my cousin’s child, four years before: and he had screamed in my face - I said, ‘Give him to me, babies love me.’