Pride

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

  The Romans were the practical and political nation of antiquity. Their calling was to carry out the idea of the state and of civil law, and to unite the nations of the world in a colossal empire, stretching from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, and from the Libyan desert to the banks of the Rhine. This empire embraced the most fertile and civilized countries of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and about one hundred millions of human beings, perhaps one-third of the whole race at the time of the introduction of Christianity.76 To this outward extent corresponds its historical significance. The history of every ancient nation ends, says Niebuhr, as the history of every modern nation begins, in that of Rome. Its history has therefore a universal interest; it is a vast storehouse of the legacies of antiquity. If the Greeks had, of all nations, the deepest mind, and in literature even gave laws to their conquerors, the Romans had the strongest character, and were born to rule the world without. This difference of course reached even into the moral and religious life of the two nations. Was the Greek, mythology the work of artistic fantasy and a religion of poesy, so was the Roman the work of calculation adapted to state purposes, political and utilitarian, but at the same time solemn, earnest, and energetic. "The Romans had no love of beauty, like the Greeks. They held no communion with nature, like the Germans. Their one idea was Rome—not ancient, fabulous, poetical Rome, but Rome warring and conquering; and orbis terrarum domina. S. P. Q. R. is inscribed on almost every page of their literature."77 The Romans from the first believed themselves called to govern the world. They looked upon all foreigners—not as barbarians, like the cultured Greeks, but—as enemies to be conquered and reduced to servitude. War and triumph were their highest conception of human glory and happiness. The "Tu, regere imperio populos, Romane, memento!"had been their motto, in fact, long before Virgil thus gave it form. The very name of the urbs aeterna, and the characteristic legend of its founding, prophesied its future. In their greatest straits the Romans never for a moment despaired of the commonwealth. With vast energy, profound policy, unwavering consistency, and wolf-like rapacity, they pursued their ambitious schemes, and became indeed the lords, but also, as their greatest historian, Tacitus, says, the insatiable robbers of the world.78

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

  So I went out for track. And I found that I could run. And no one could take that away. Now I gave up selling encyclopedias, and all the old familiar rejection that went with it, and I turned to the want ads. In no time I spotted a small ad inside a thick black border. Wanted: Securities Salesmen. I certainly figured to have better luck selling securities. After all, I had an MBA. And before leaving home I’d had a pretty successful interview with Dean Witter. I did some research and found that this job had two things going for it. First, it was with Investors Overseas Services, which was headed by Bernard Cornfeld, one of the most famous businessmen of the 1960s. Second, it was located in the top floor of a beautiful beachside tower. Twenty-foot windows overlooking that turquoise sea. Both of these things appealed to me, and made me press hard in the interview. Somehow, after weeks of being unable to talk anyone into buying an encyclopedia, I talked Team Cornfeld into taking a flyer on me. CORNFELD’S EXTRAORDINARY SUCCESS, plus that breathtaking view, made it possible most days to forget that the firm was nothing more than a boiler room. Cornfeld was notorious for asking his employees if they sincerely wanted to be rich, and every day a dozen wolfish young men demonstrated that they did, they sincerely did. With ferocity, with abandon, they crashed the phones, cold-calling prospects, scrambling desperately to arrange face-to-face meetings. I wasn’t a smooth talker. I wasn’t any kind of talker. Still, I knew numbers, and I knew the product: Dreyfus Funds. More, I knew how to speak the truth. People seemed to like that. I was quickly able to schedule a few meetings, and to close a few sales. Inside a week I’d earned enough in commissions to pay my half of the rent for the next six months, with plenty left over for surfboard wax. Most of my discretionary income went to the dive bars along the water. Tourists tended to hang out in the luxe resorts, the ones with names like incantations— the Moana, the Halekulani—but Carter and I preferred the dives. We liked to sit with our fellow beachniks and surf bums, seekers and vagabonds, feeling smug about the one thing we had in our favor. Geography. Those poor suckers back home, we’d say. Those poor saps sleepwalking through their humdrum lives, bundled against the cold and rain. Why can’t they be more like us? Why can’t they seize the day? 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.

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

  somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two dollars a share. TBD. Of 50 million shares, total, almost 30 million would be held in reserve, and about 2 million class Bs would be sold to the public. Of the roughly 17 million remaining class A shares, the preexisting shareholders, or insiders, meaning me, Bowerman, the debenture holders, and the Buttfaces, would own 56 percent. I personally would own about 46 percent. It needed to be that much, we all agreed, because the company needed to be run by one person, to speak with one firm and steady voice—come what may. There could be no chance of alliances or breakaway factions, no existential struggles for control. To the outsider the division of shares might have seemed disproportionate, unbalanced, unfair. To the Butt-faces it was a necessity. There wasn’t a word of dissent or complaint. Ever. WE HIT THE road. Days before the offering we went out to sell potential investors on the worthiness of our product, our company, our brand. Ourselves. After China, we weren’t in any mood to travel, but there was no other way. We had to do what Wall Street calls a dog-and-pony show. Twelve cities, seven days. First stop, Manhattan. Breakfast meeting with a roomful of hard-eyed bankers, who represented thousands of potential investors. Hayes rose first and said a few introductory words. He summed up the numbers succinctly. He was quite good. Forceful, sober. Johnson then stood and spoke about the shoes themselves, what made them different and special, how they’d come to be so innovative. He was never better. I closed. I talked about the company’s origins, its soul and spirit. I had a note card with a few words scribbled on it, but I didn’t look at it once. I had no uncertainty about what I wanted to say. I’m not sure I could’ve explained myself to a roomful of strangers, but I had no trouble explaining Nike. I started with Bowerman. I talked about running for him at Oregon, then forming a partnership with him as a kid in my mid-twenties. I talked about his brains, his bravery, his magic waffle iron. I talked about his booby-trapped mailbox. It was a funny story, and it never failed to get a laugh, but it had a point. I wanted to let these New Yorkers know that though we hailed from Oregon, we were not to be trifled with. The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us. That first night we gave the same presentation at a formal dinner, in Midtown, before twice as many bankers. Cocktails were served beforehand. Hayes had one too many. This time, when he stood to speak, he decided to improvise, to free-style. “I’ve been around these guys a long time,” he said, laughing, “the core of the company, you might say, and I’m here to tell you, haha, they’re all chronic unemployables.” Dry coughs. A throat in the back was cleared.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  [It is in] this spirit of self-naming, an ethnic/sexual pride, [that] the term "same-gender-loving" (SGL) was introduced to fortify the lives and illuminate the voices of [sexual minorities of color]; to provide a powerful identi[t]y not marginalized by "racism" in the gay community or "homophobic" attitudes in society. [...] It is the intention of the [same gender loving] movement to break this cycle." Black sexual minorities' engagement of same-gender loving has myriad sociocultural and political implications, especially since it acknowledges both sameness and difference.19 Moreover, it resists the essentialism, in terms of race and sexuality, that black nationalist and gay and lesbian discourses, as well as queer theory, largely occlude. The revolutionary possibilities of same-gender loving lie in its ability to draw critical and necessary attention to racialized same-sex acts and illuminate the realities of black sexuality, rather than problematically, and at times erroneously, reduce some individuals to confining sexual labels and identifiers. Even the term "homosexual" itself emerged, as Michel Foucault avers, as a clinical description for a type of individual rather than a sexual activity.20 Same-gender loving, unlike most sexual categories, resists and avoids the all-too-pervasive tendency to define and/or demarcate individuals on the basis of sexual orientation or reduce black sexual minorities merely and inevitably to a sexuality. Same-gender loving expands the ways we conceptualize black sexual desire, eroticism, and loving; and it resists and destabilizes the politics of silence surrounding sexuality, especially black female sexuality, that has long persisted. Forcing us to engage sexuality and gender discourses seen primarily as disclosures in the black community and society at large, it enables us to discuss with depth and accuracy the particularities of black sexual lives, intimacies, and desires without being stymied by sexual labels, silences, or boundaries.21

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

  I always said that Woodell made the trains run on time, but it was Hayes who laid down the tracks. Hayes set up all the esoteric accounting systems without which the company would have ground to a halt. When we first went from manual to automated accounting, Hayes acquired the first primitive machines, and by constantly mending them, modifying them, or pounding them with his big hammy fists, he kept them uncannily accurate. When we first started doing business outside the United States, foreign currencies became a devilishly tricky problem, and Hayes set up an ingenious currency-hedging system, which made the spread more reliable, more predictable. Despite our hijinks, despite our eccentricities, despite our physical limitations, I concluded in 1976 that we were a formidable team. (Years later a famous Harvard business professor studying Nike came to the same conclusion. “Normally,” he said, “if one manager at a company can think tactically and strategically, that company has a good future. But boy are you lucky: More than half the Buttfaces think that way!”) Undoubtedly we looked, to any casual observer, like a sorry, motley crew, hopelessly mismatched. But in fact we were more alike than different, and that gave a coherence to our goals and our efforts. We were mostly Oregon guys, which was important. We had an inborn need to prove ourselves, to show the world that we weren’t hicks and hayseeds. And we were nearly all merciless self-loathers, which kept the egos in check. There was none of that smartest-guy-in-the-room foolishness. Hayes, Strasser, Woodell, Johnson, each would have been the smartest guy in any room, but none believed it of himself, or the next guy. Our meetings were defined by contempt, disdain, and heaps of abuse. Oh, what abuse. We called each other terrible names. We rained down verbal blows. While floating ideas, and shooting down ideas, and hashing out threats to the company, the last thing we took into account was someone’s feelings. Including mine. Especially mine. My fellow Buttfaces, my employees, called me Bucky the Bookkeeper, constantly. I never asked them to stop. I knew better. If you showed any weakness, any sentimentality, you were dead. I remember a Buttface when Strasser decided we weren’t being “aggressive” enough in our approach. Too many bean counters in this company, he said. “So before this meeting starts I want to interject something. I’ve prepared here a counter budget.” He waved a big binder. “This right here is what we should be doing with our money.” Of course everyone wanted to see his numbers, but no one more than the numbers guy, Hayes. When we discovered that the numbers didn’t add up, not one column, we started howling. Strasser took it personally. “It’s the essence I’m getting at,” he said. “Not the specifics. The essence.”

• From Educated (2018)

  That was how it felt the first time the director spoke to me, like he was speaking from another dimension. All he said was, “Go find FDR.” I didn’t move. He tried again. “President Roosevelt. FDR.” “Is that like a JCB?” I said. “You need a forklift?” Everyone laughed. I’d memorized all my lines, but at rehearsals I sat alone, pretending to study my black binder. When it was my turn onstage, I would recite my lines loudly and without hesitation. That made me feel a kind of confidence. If I didn’t have anything to say, at least Annie did. A week before opening night, Mother dyed my brown hair cherry red. The director said it was perfect, that all I needed now was to finish my costumes before the dress rehearsal on Saturday. In our basement I found an oversized knit sweater, stained and hole-ridden, and an ugly blue dress, which Mother bleached to a faded brown. The dress was perfect for an orphan, and I was relieved at how easy finding the costumes had been, until I remembered that in act two Annie wears beautiful dresses, which Daddy Warbucks buys for her. I didn’t have anything like that. I told Mother and her face sank. We drove a hundred miles round-trip, searching every secondhand shop along the way, but found nothing. Sitting in the parking lot of the last shop, Mother pursed her lips, then said, “There’s one more place we can try.” We drove to my aunt Angie’s and parked in front of the white picket fence she shared with Grandma. Mother knocked, then stood back from the door and smoothed her hair. Angie looked surprised to see us—Mother rarely visited her sister—but she smiled warmly and invited us in. Her front room reminded me of fancy hotel lobbies from the movies, there was so much silk and lace. Mother and I sat on a pleated sofa of pale pink while Mother explained why we’d come. Angie said her daughter had a few dresses that might do. Mother waited on the pink sofa while Angie led me upstairs to her daughter’s room and laid out an armful of dresses, each so fine, with such intricate lace patterns and delicately tied bows, that at first I was afraid to touch them. Angie helped me into each one, knotting the sashes, fastening the buttons, plumping the bows. “You should take this one,” she said, passing me a navy dress with white braided cords arranged across the bodice. “Grandma sewed this detailing.” I took the dress, along with another made of red velvet collared with white lace, and Mother and I drove home. The play opened a week later. Dad was in the front row. When the performance ended, he marched right to the box office and bought tickets for the next night. It was all he talked about that Sunday in church. Not doctors, or the Illuminati, or Y2K.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Sula, in 1927 and thereafter, practically does just this. In addition to leaving Medallion (instead of settling down and marrying like other Bottom women), she returns from college refusing to use her education in the interest of the community and in the service or uplift of the race. Moreover, she travels intranationally, a luxury unavailable to most black women (save blues singers), demonstrating her uncategorically autonomous lifestyle. Her existence, simply put, is not coterminous with boundaries for women or self-abnegation for anyone or anything: men or race. While Sula's behavior during the 192os dialogizes larger sociopolitical and racial discourses of that era, she-as a character of a novel produced during a later historical and sociopolitical juncturealso offers provocative commentary on discourses and concerns contemporaneous with the post-civil rights, black feminist era in which Morrison's book was published. In the same year that Sula was published, 1973, the National Black Feminist Organization was founded in the spirit of challenging the racism and elitism of the women's movement, as well as politics that privileged masculine authority, patriarchy, and sexism that marginalized black women and their exigencies within the struggle for liberation. As the Combahee River Collective, an organization of black feminists and lesbians founded the year after Sula appeared in print, asserts, their politics embrace black and women's liberation, and are defined by a consciousness and feminism they utilized as "political analysis and practice" to struggle against oppression.27 While predating the collective's "A Black Feminist Statement" (1978), Sula personifies the idea, one of its central premises, that black women's liberation is essential, "a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's" but, rather, as indicative of their "need as human persons for autonomy."28 Similarly, as Morrison herself writes in her 1971 manifesto "What the Black Woman Thinks about Women's Lib," in light of the plethora of duties and responsibilities of black womanhood, black women "had nothing to fall back on""not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything"-and out of the profound desolation of her reality," the black woman may "very well have invented herself."29 Sula embodies these collective philosophies and feminist ideologies in her nonconformity to convention or the status quo that would relegate her, as black and a woman, to a marginal or adjunct status. And, it is with that same sensibility, as the narratorial consciousness asserts, that she-upon recognition that she was neither white nor male-created "something else," an alternative, by which to exist. "And [...] She Became Dangerous": Sula's Subversive and Transgressive (Adult) Behavior

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

  Shoe producers, I told him, are abandoning Japan en masse. And they’re all landing in two places. Korea and Taiwan. Both countries specialize in low-priced footwear, but Korea has elected to go with a few giant factories, whereas Taiwan is building a hundred smaller ones. So that’s why we’re choosing Taiwan: Our demand is too high, our volume too low, for the biggest factories. And in smaller factories we’ll have the dominant position. We’ll be in charge. Of course, the tougher challenge was to get any factory we chose to upgrade its quality. And then there was the constant threat of political instability. President Chiang Kai-shek had just died, I told Gorman, and after twenty-five years in command he was leaving a nasty power vacuum. For good measure, you always needed to account for Taiwan’s ancient tensions with China. On and on I talked as we sailed over the Pacific. While taking copious notes, Gorman also came up with new, fresh ideas, which gave me new insights, things to think about. Stepping off the plane in Taichung, our first stop, I was delighted. This guy was intense, energetic, eager to get started. I was proud to be his mentor. Good choice, I told myself. By the time we reached the hotel, however, Gorman was wilting. Taichung looked and smelled like the far end of the galaxy. A vast megalopolis of smoking factories, and thousands of people per square foot, it was unlike anything I’d ever seen, and I’d been all over Asia, so of course it overwhelmed poor Gorman. I saw in his eyes that typical first-timer’s reaction to Asia, that look of alienation and circuit overload. He looked exactly like Penny when she met me in Japan. Steady, I told him. Take it one day, one factory, at a time. Follow your mentor’s lead. Over the next week we visited and toured about two dozen factories. Most were bad. Dark, dirty, with workers going through the motions, heads bowed, vacant looks in their eyes. Just outside Taichung, however, in the small town of Douliou, we found a factory that showed promise. It was called Feng Tay, and it was managed by a young man named C. H. Wong. Small, but clean, it had a positive vibe, as did Wong, a shoe dog who lived for his workplace. And in it. When we noticed that one small room off the factory floor was off-limits, I asked what was in there. Home, he said. “That is where my wife and I and our three kids live.” I was reminded of Johnson. I decided to make Feng Tay the cornerstone of our Taiwan effort.

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

  It took fifty drafts, at least, to get it looking and sounding the way we wanted. Finally, at the tail end of summer, we handed all our paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and at the start of September we released the formal announcement. Nike will be creating 20 million shares of class A stock and 30 million shares of class B. The price of the stock, we told the world, would be somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two dollars a share. TBD. Of 50 million shares, total, almost 30 million would be held in reserve, and about 2 million class Bs would be sold to the public. Of the roughly 17 million remaining class A shares, the preexisting shareholders, or insiders, meaning me, Bowerman, the debenture holders, and the Buttfaces, would own 56 percent. I personally would own about 46 percent. It needed to be that much, we all agreed, because the company needed to be run by one person, to speak with one firm and steady voice—come what may. There could be no chance of alliances or breakaway factions, no existential struggles for control. To the outsider the division of shares might have seemed disproportionate, unbalanced, unfair. To the Butt-faces it was a necessity. There wasn’t a word of dissent or complaint. Ever. WE HIT THE road. Days before the offering we went out to sell potential investors on the worthiness of our product, our company, our brand. Ourselves. After China, we weren’t in any mood to travel, but there was no other way. We had to do what Wall Street calls a dog-and-pony show. Twelve cities, seven days. First stop, Manhattan. Breakfast meeting with a roomful of hard-eyed bankers, who represented thousands of potential investors. Hayes rose first and said a few introductory words. He summed up the numbers succinctly. He was quite good. Forceful, sober. Johnson then stood and spoke about the shoes themselves, what made them different and special, how they’d come to be so innovative. He was never better. I closed. I talked about the company’s origins, its soul and spirit. I had a note card with a few words scribbled on it, but I didn’t look at it once. I had no uncertainty about what I wanted to say. I’m not sure I could’ve explained myself to a roomful of strangers, but I had no trouble explaining Nike. I started with Bowerman. I talked about running for him at Oregon, then forming a partnership with him as a kid in my mid-twenties. I talked about his brains, his bravery, his magic waffle iron. I talked about his booby-trapped mailbox. It was a funny story, and it never failed to get a laugh, but it had a point. I wanted to let these New Yorkers know that though we hailed from Oregon, we were not to be trifled with. The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.

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

  Finally, at the tail end of summer, we handed all our paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and at the start of September we released the formal announcement. Nike will be creating 20 million shares of class A stock and 30 million shares of class B. The price of the stock, we told the world, would be somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two dollars a share. TBD. Of 50 million shares, total, almost 30 million would be held in reserve, and about 2 million class Bs would be sold to the public. Of the roughly 17 million remaining class A shares, the preexisting shareholders, or insiders, meaning me, Bowerman, the debenture holders, and the Buttfaces, would own 56 percent. I personally would own about 46 percent. It needed to be that much, we all agreed, because the company needed to be run by one person, to speak with one firm and steady voice—come what may. There could be no chance of alliances or breakaway factions, no existential struggles for control. To the outsider the division of shares might have seemed disproportionate, unbalanced, unfair. To the Butt-faces it was a necessity. There wasn’t a word of dissent or complaint. Ever. WE HIT THE road. Days before the offering we went out to sell potential investors on the worthiness of our product, our company, our brand. Ourselves. After China, we weren’t in any mood to travel, but there was no other way. We had to do what Wall Street calls a dog-and-pony show. Twelve cities, seven days. First stop, Manhattan. Breakfast meeting with a roomful of hard-eyed bankers, who represented thousands of potential investors. Hayes rose first and said a few introductory words. He summed up the numbers succinctly. He was quite good. Forceful, sober. Johnson then stood and spoke about the shoes themselves, what made them different and special, how they’d come to be so innovative. He was never better. I closed. I talked about the company’s origins, its soul and spirit. I had a note card with a few words scribbled on it, but I didn’t look at it once. I had no uncertainty about what I wanted to say. I’m not sure I could’ve explained myself to a roomful of strangers, but I had no trouble explaining Nike. I started with Bowerman. I talked about running for him at Oregon, then forming a partnership with him as a kid in my mid-twenties. I talked about his brains, his bravery, his magic waffle iron. I talked about his booby-trapped mailbox. It was a funny story, and it never failed to get a laugh, but it had a point. I wanted to let these New Yorkers know that though we hailed from Oregon, we were not to be trifled with. The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.

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

  THE PROBLEMS WERE never going to stop, I realized, but for the moment we had more momentum than problems. To build on this momentum we rolled out a new ad campaign with a sexy new slogan: “There is no finish line.” It was the idea of our new ad agency and its CEO, John Brown. He’d just opened his own shop in Seattle, and he was young, bright, and of course the opposite of an athlete. That was all we seemed to hire in those days. Besides Johnson and myself, Nike was a haven for the sedentary. Still, nonjock or not, Brown managed to dream up a campaign and a tagline that perfectly captured Nike’s philosophy. His ad showed a single runner on a lonely country road, surrounded by tall Douglas firs. Oregon, clearly. The copy read: “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.” Everyone around me thought the ad was bold, fresh. It didn’t focus on the product, but on the spirit behind the product, which was something you never saw in the 1970s. People congratulated me on that ad as if we’d achieved something earth-shattering. I’d shrug. I wasn’t being modest. I still didn’t believe in the power of advertising. At all. A product, I thought, speaks for itself, or it doesn’t. In the end, it’s only quality that counts. I couldn’t imagine that any ad campaign would ever prove me wrong or change my mind. Our advertising people, of course, told me I was wrong, wrong, a thousand percent wrong. But again and again I’d ask them: Can you say definitively that people are buying Nikes because of your ad? Can you show it to me in black-and-white numbers? Silence. No, they’d say… we can’t say that definitively. So then it’s a little hard to get enthused, I’d say—isn’t it? Silence. I OFTEN WISHED I had more time to kick back and debate the niceties of advertising. Our semidaily crises were always bigger and more pressing than what slogan to print under a picture of our shoes. In the second half of 1977 the crisis was our debenture holders. They were suddenly clamoring for a way to cash in. By far the best way for them to do so would be a public offering, which, we tried to explain to them, was not an option. They didn’t want to hear that.

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

  MY SALES STRATEGY was simple, and I thought rather brilliant. After being rejected by a couple of sporting goods stores (“Kid, what this world does not need is another track shoe!”), I drove all over the Pacific Northwest, to various track meets. Between races I’d chat up the coaches, the runners, the fans, and show them my wares. The response was always the same. I couldn’t write orders fast enough. Driving back to Portland I’d puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible. Sometimes people wanted my shoes so badly that they’d write me, or phone me, saying they’d heard about the new Tigers and just had to have a pair, could I please send them, COD? Without my even trying, my mail order business was born. Sometimes people would simply show up at my parents’ house. Every few nights the doorbell would ring, and my father, grumbling, would get up from his vinyl recliner and turn down the TV and wonder who in the world. There on the porch would be some skinny kid with oddly muscular legs, shifty-eyed and twitchy, like a junky looking to score. “Buck here?” the kid would say. My father would call through the kitchen to my room in the servants’ quarters. I’d come out, invite the kid in, show him over to the sofa, then kneel before him and measure his foot. My father, hands jammed into his pockets, would watch the whole transaction, incredulous. Most people who came to the house had found me through word of mouth. Friend of a friend. But a few found me through my first attempt at advertising—a handout I’d designed and produced at a local print shop. Along the top, in big type, it said: Best news in flats! Japan challenges European track shoe domination! The handout then went on to explain: Low Japanese labor costs make it possible for an exciting new firm to offer these shoes at the low low price of $6.95. Along the bottom was my address and phone number. I nailed them up all over Portland.

• From Educated (2018)

  In the end, I chose four intellectual movements from the nineteenth century and examined how they had struggled with the question of family obligation. One of the movements I chose was nineteenth-century Mormonism. I worked for a solid year, and at the end of it I had a draft of my thesis: “The Family, Morality, and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890.” The chapter on Mormonism was my favorite. As a child in Sunday school, I’d been taught that all history was a preparation for Mormonism: that every event since the death of Christ had been fashioned by God to make possible the moment when Joseph Smith would kneel in the Sacred Grove and God would restore the one true church. Wars, migrations, natural disasters—these were mere preludes to the Mormon story. On the other hand, secular histories tended to overlook spiritual movements like Mormonism altogether. My dissertation gave a different shape to history, one that was neither Mormon nor anti-Mormon, neither spiritual nor profane. It didn’t treat Mormonism as the objective of human history, but neither did it discount the contribution Mormonism had made in grappling with the questions of the age. Instead, it treated the Mormon ideology as a chapter in the larger human story. In my account, history did not set Mormons apart from the rest of the human family; it bound them to it. I sent Dr. Runciman the draft, and a few days later we met in his office. He sat across from me and, with a look of astonishment, said it was good. “Some parts of it are very good,” he said. He was smiling now. “I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t earn a doctorate.” As I walked home carrying the heavy manuscript, I remembered attending one of Dr. Kerry’s lectures, which he had begun by writing, “Who writes history?” on the blackboard. I remembered how strange the question had seemed to me then. My idea of a historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of the past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even augmented. Now, as I passed through King’s College, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny. Who writes history? I thought. I do . —ON MY TWENTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, the birthday I had chosen, I submitted my PhD dissertation. The defense took place in December, in a small, simply furnished room. I passed and returned to London, where Drew had a job and we’d rented a flat. In January, nearly ten years to the day since I’d set foot in my first classroom at BYU, I received confirmation from the University of Cambridge: I was Dr. Westover. I had built a new life, and it was a happy one, but I felt a sense of loss that went beyond family. I had lost Buck’s Peak, not by leaving but by leaving silently.

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

  Whatever you dummies think best. WE WERE ON track in 1979 for sales of $140 million. Better yet, our quality was rising apace. People in the trade, industry insiders, were writing articles, praising us for “finally” putting out a better shoe than Adidas. Personally, I thought the insiders were late to the party. Other than a few early stumbles, our quality had been tops for years. And we’d never lagged in innovation. (Plus, we had Rudy’s air soles in the pipeline.) Aside from our war with the government, we were in great shape.

• From Educated (2018)

  Kerry had, tipping and swaying in the wind; everyone else was holding tightly to the stone parapet, knees bent, backs arched, as if unsure whether to walk or crawl. I raised my hand and gripped the wall. “You don’t need to do that,” he said. “It’s not a criticism.” He paused, as if unsure he should say more. “Everyone has undergone a change,” he said. “The other students were relaxed until we came to this height. Now they are uncomfortable, on edge. You seem to have made the opposite journey. This is the first time I’ve seen you at home in yourself. It’s in the way you move: it’s as if you’ve been on this roof all your life.” A gust of wind swept over the parapet and Dr. Kerry teetered, clutching the wall. I stepped up onto the ridge so he could flatten himself against the buttress. He stared at me, waiting for an explanation. “I’ve roofed my share of hay sheds,” I said finally. “So your legs are stronger? Is that why you can stand in this wind?” I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your mind.” He stared at me blankly. He hadn’t understood. “I’m just standing,” I said. “You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.” “The way it is nothing to you,” he said. —I WANTED THE MIND of a scholar, but saw in myself the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in a library; I belonged in a crane. The first week passed in a blur of lectures. In the second week, every student was assigned a supervisor to guide their research. My supervisor, I learned, was the eminent Professor Jonathan Steinberg, a former vice-master of a Cambridge college, who was much celebrated for his writings on the Holocaust. My first meeting with Professor Steinberg took place a few days later. I waited at the porter’s lodge until a thin man appeared and, producing a set of heavy keys, unlocked a wooden door set into the stone. I followed him up a spiral staircase and into the clock tower itself, where there was a well-lit room with simple furnishings: two chairs and a wooden table. I could hear the blood pounding behind my ears as I sat down. Professor Steinberg was in his seventies but I would not have described him as an old man. He was lithe, and his eyes moved about the room with probing energy. His speech was measured and fluid. “I am Professor Steinberg,” he said.

• From Educated (2018)

  She was a grown woman with seven children, but this was the first time in her life that she was, without question or caveat, the one in charge. Sometimes, in the days after a birth, I detected in her something of Judy’s heavy presence, in a forceful turn of her head, or the imperious arch of an eyebrow. She stopped wearing makeup, then she stopped apologizing for not wearing it. Mother charged about five hundred dollars for a delivery, and this was another way midwifing changed her: suddenly she had money. Dad didn’t believe that women should work, but I suppose he thought it was all right for Mother to be paid for midwifing, because it undermined the Government. Also, we needed the money. Dad worked harder than any man I knew, but scrapping and building barns and hay sheds didn’t bring in much, and it helped that Mother could buy groceries with the envelopes of small bills she kept in her purse. Sometimes, if we’d spent the whole day flying about the valley, delivering herbs and doing prenatal exams, Mother would use that money to take me and Audrey out to eat. Grandma-over-in-town had given me a journal, pink with a caramel-colored teddy bear on the cover, and in it I recorded the first time Mother took us to a restaurant, which I described as “real fancy with menus and everything.” According to the entry, my meal came to $3.30. Mother also used the money to improve herself as a midwife. She bought an oxygen tank in case a baby came out and couldn’t breathe, and she took a suturing class so she could stitch the women who tore. Judy had always sent women to the hospital for stitches, but Mother was determined to learn. Self-reliance, I imagine her thinking. With the rest of the money, Mother put in a phone line.* One day a white van appeared, and a handful of men in dark overalls began climbing over the utility poles by the highway. Dad burst through the back door demanding to know what the hell was going on. “I thought you wanted a phone,” Mother said, her eyes so full of surprise they were irreproachable. She went on, talking fast. “You said there could be trouble if someone goes into labor and Grandma isn’t home to take the call. I thought, He’s right, we need a phone! Silly me! Did I misunderstand?” Dad stood there for several seconds, his mouth open. Of course a midwife needs a phone, he said. Then he went back to the junkyard and that’s all that was ever said about it. We hadn’t had a telephone for as long as I could remember, but the next day there it was, resting in a lime-green cradle, its glossy finish looking out of place next to the murky jars of cohosh and skullcap. —LUKE WAS FIFTEEN WHEN he asked Mother if he could have a birth certificate.

• 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 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. SALES HAD BEEN climbing geometrically, year after year, ever since the first few hundred pairs I sold out of my Valiant. But as we closed out 1977… sales were going berserk. Nearly $70 million.

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

  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. SALES HAD BEEN climbing geometrically, year after year, ever since the first few hundred pairs I sold out of my Valiant. But as we closed out 1977... sales were going berserk. Nearly $70 million. So Penny and I decided to buy a bigger house. It was a strange thing to do, in the midst of an apocalyptic fight with the government. But I liked the idea of acting as if things were going to work out. Fortune favors the brave, that sort of thing. I also liked the idea of a change of scenery. Maybe, I thought, it will initiate a change of luck. We were sad to leave the old house, of course. Both boys had taken their first steps there, and Matthew had lived for that swimming pool. He was never so at peace as when frolicking in the water. I recall Penny shaking her head and saying, “One thing’s for certain. That boy will never drown.” But both boys were getting so big, they desperately needed more room, and the new place had plenty. It sat on five acres high above Hillsboro, and every room felt spacious and airy. From the first night we knew we’d found our home. There was even a built-in niche for my recliner. To honor our new address, our new start, I tried to keep a new schedule. Unless I was out of town, I tried to attend all the youth basketball games, and youth soccer games, and Little League games.

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

  WE CHOSE A date for the offering. December 2, 1980. The last remaining hurdle was settling on a price. The night before the offering Hayes came into my office. “The guys at Kuhn, Loeb are recommending twenty dollars per share,” he said. “Too low,” I said. “It’s insulting.” Well, it can’t be too high, he cautioned. We want the damn thing to sell. The whole process was crazy-making, because it was imprecise. There was no right number. It was all a matter of opinion, feeling, selling. Selling—that’s what I’d been doing for much of these last eighteen years, and I was tired of it. I didn’t want to sell anymore. Our stock was worth twenty-two dollars a share. That was the number. We’d earned that number. We deserved to be on the high end of the price range. A company called Apple was also going public that same week, and selling for twenty-two dollars a share, and we were worth as much as them, I said to Hayes. If a bunch of Wall Street guys didn’t see it that way, I was ready to walk away from the deal. I glared at Hayes. I knew what he was thinking. Here we go again. Pay Nissho first. THE NEXT MORNING Hayes and I drove downtown to our law firm. A clerk showed us into the senior partner’s office. A paralegal dialed Kuhn, Loeb in New York, then clicked a button on a speaker in the middle of the big walnut desk. Hayes and I stared at the speaker. Disembodied voices filled the room. One of the voices grew louder, clearer. “Gentlemen… good morning.” “Good morning,” we said. The loud voice took the lead. It gave a long and careful explanation of Kuhn, Loeb’s reasoning on the stock price, which was jabberwocky. And so, the loud voice said, we can’t go any higher than twenty-one dollars. “No,” I said. “Our number is twenty-two.” We heard the other voices murmuring. They came up to twenty-one-fifty. “I’m afraid,” said the loud voice, “that’s our final offer.” “Gentlemen, twenty-two is our number.” Hayes stared at me. I stared at the speaker. Cracking silence. We could hear heavy breaths, pops, scrapes. Papers being shuffled. I closed my eyes and let all that white noise wash over me. I relived every negotiation in my life to that point. So, Dad, you remember that Crazy Idea I had at Stanford…? Gentlemen, I represent Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon. You see, Dot, I love Penny. And Penny loves me. And if things continue in this vein, I see us building a life together. “I’m sorry,” the loud voice said angrily. “We’ll have to call you back.” Click. We sat. We said nothing. I took long deep breaths. The clerk’s face slowly melted. Five minutes passed. Fifteen minutes. Sweat ran down Hayes’s forehead and neck. The phone rang. The clerk looked at us, to make sure we were ready. We nodded. He pressed the button on the speaker.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I don’t own this land. I’ve only got permission to fly here. But in walking it over and over again and paying it the greatest attention I’ve made it mine. I know where its animals live, and how they move about it. Know that the larks sleep on the top of the hill, but on sunny mornings they move to warm themselves on eastward slopes. That when the weather is wet but the rain has stopped, the rabbits in the warrens near the ditches move eastward onto the drier fields to graze. This sense of where the animals are is the coincidence of long experience with unconsciously noted clues. The incidence of sunlight on a stubblefield, and the pressure of wind on the same. The precise colour of the ground. I move towards the larks as if I could see them. But the biggest field – one planted with oilseed rape – is not like the others. It is a mystery. Walking it with Mabel is like playing natural-historical battleships. Anything could be living in those thick-packed bluish leaves. Pheasants, partridges, hares – even a jack snipe, whirring up with snappy wingbeats from a muddy patch near the hedge. It seems ludicrous that anything could be invisible in a bare two inches of herbage. But everything is. There is a sense of creation about it: when the hare leapt up from our feet today it was as if it had been made by the field ex nihilo. The hare had an ally: a strong north-easterly. Mabel tried twice to grab it, and both times it jinked across the wind and she missed. It is very strange watching a hawk chase a land animal in a high wind. The hare has purchase: its claws and furry pads dig into leaves and mud, and it uses the ground to propel itself against. But the hawk moves in air alone. It is like watching one element against another. One world versus another, like a gannet diving into the sea for fish. I am glad she did not catch the hare. There is the tree Mabel dived from to cosh me on the head. There’s the invisible line in the air along which for the very first time she followed a cock pheasant to cover. There’s the hedge where she clung, tail fanned wide, wings pressed against twigs, looking for a pigeon already gone. There is the bramble bush that tripped me and pitched me into a flooded ditch. The hawk and I have a shared history of these fields. There are ghosts here, but they are not long-dead falconers. They are ghosts of things that happened.