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.

Page 8 of 174 · 20 per page

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

  PENNY WAS CONTINUING to find creative ways of stretching her twenty-five-dollar grocery allowance, which meant fifty kinds of beef Stroganoff, which meant my weight ballooned. By the middle of 1970 I was around 190, an all-time high. One morning, getting dressed for work, I put on one of my baggier suits and it wasn’t baggy. Standing before the mirror I said to my reflection: “Uh-oh.” But it was more than the Stroganoff. Somehow, I’d gotten out of the running habit. Blue Ribbon, marriage, fatherhood—there was never time. Also, I’d felt burned out. Though I’d loved running for Bowerman, I’d hated it, too. The same thing happens to all kinds of college athletes. Years of training and competing at a high level take their toll. You need a rest. But now the rest was over. I needed to get back out there. I didn’t want to be the fat, flabby, sedentary head of a running-shoe company. And if tight suits and the specter of hypocrisy weren’t enough incentive, another motivation soon came along. Shortly after that all-comers race, after Grelle refused me the loan, he and I went for a private run. Four miles in, I saw Grelle looking back at me sadly as I huffed and puffed to keep up. It was one thing to have him refuse me money, it was another to have him give me pity. He knew I was embarrassed, so he challenged me. “This fall,” he said, “let’s you and me race—one mile. I’ll give you a full minute handicap, and if you beat me I’ll pay you a buck for every second of difference in our times.” I trained hard that summer. I got into the habit of running six miles every night after work. In no time I was back in shape, my weight down to 160. And when the day of the big race came—with Woodell on the stopwatch—I took thirty-six dollars from Grelle. (The victory was made all the sweeter the following week when Grelle jumped into an all-comers meet and ran 4:07.) As I drove home that day I felt immensely proud. Keep going, I told myself. Don’t stop. AT ALMOST THE halfway mark of the year—June 15, 1970—I pulled my Sports Illustrated from my mailbox and got a shock. On the cover was a Man of Oregon. And not just any Man of Oregon, but perhaps the greatest of all time, greater even than Grelle. His name was Steve Prefontaine, and the photo showed him sprinting up the side of Olympus, aka Bowerman Mountain.

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

  It took a half hour to name them all. I felt like Coleridge, writing “Kubla Khan” in an opium daze. I then mailed my names off to the factory. It was dark as I walked out of the office building, into the crowded Tokyo street. A feeling came over me, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I felt spent, but proud. I felt drained, but exhilarated. I felt everything I ever hoped to feel after a day’s work. I felt like an artist, a creator. I looked back over my shoulder, took one last look at Nissho’s offices. Under my breath I said, “We made this.” I’D BEEN IN Japan three weeks, longer than I expected, which posed two problems. The world was large, but the shoe world was small, and if Onitsuka got wind that I was in their “neighborhood,” and didn’t stop by, they’d know I was up to something. It wouldn’t take much for them to find out, or figure out, that I was lining up their replacement. So I needed to go down to Kobe, make an appearance at Onitsuka’s offices. But extending my trip, being gone from home another week, was unacceptable. Penny and I had never been apart that long. I phoned her and asked her to fly over and join me for this last leg. Penny jumped at the chance. She’d never seen Asia, and this might be her last chance before we were out of business and out of money. It might also be her last chance to use that matching pink luggage. And Dot was available for babysitting. The flight was long, though, and Penny didn’t like planes. When I went to the Tokyo airport to meet her, I knew I’d be collecting a fragile woman. I forgot, however, how intimidating Haneda Airport could be. It was a solid mass of bodies and baggage. I couldn’t move, couldn’t find Penny. Suddenly she appeared at the sliding glass doors of customs. She was trying to push forward, trying to get through. There were too many people—and armed police—on every side of her. She was trapped. The doors slid open, the crowd surged forward, and Penny fell into my arms. I’d never seen her so exhausted, not even after she gave birth to Matthew. I asked if the plane had a flat tire and she’d gotten out to change it. Joke? Kitami? Remember? She didn’t laugh. She said the plane hit turbulence two hours outside Tokyo and the flight was a roller coaster. She was wearing her best lime-green suit, now badly wrinkled and stained, and she was the same shade of lime-green. She needed a hot shower, and a long rest, and some fresh clothes. I told her we had a suite waiting at the wonderful Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

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

  I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful. She nodded. Like basic accounting principles, she grasped it all intuitively, right away. I asked if she was seeing anyone. She confessed that she was. But the boy—well, she said, he was just a boy. All the boys she dated, she said, were just that—boys. They talked about sports and cars. (I was smart enough not to confess that I loved both.) “But you,” she said, “you’ve seen the world. And now you’re putting everything on the line to create this company…” Her voice trailed off. I stood up straighter. We said good-bye to the lions and tigers. FOR OUR SECOND date we walked over to Jade West, a Chinese restaurant across the street from the office. Over Mongolian beef and garlic chicken she told me her story. She still lived at home, and loved her family very much, but there were challenges. Her father was an admiralty lawyer, which struck me as a good job. Their house certainly sounded bigger and better than the one in which I’d grown up. But five kids, she hinted, was a strain. Money was a constant issue. A certain amount of rationing was standard operating procedure. There was never enough; staples, like toilet paper, were always in low supply. It was a home marked by insecurity . She did not like insecurity. She preferred security. She said it again. Security . That’s why she’d been drawn to accounting. It seemed solid, dependable, safe, a line of work she could always rely on. I asked how she’d happened to choose Portland State. She said she’d started out at Oregon State. “Oh,” I said, as if she’d confessed to doing time in prison. She laughed. “If it’s any consolation, I hated it.” In particular, she couldn’t abide the school’s requirement that every student take at least one class in public speaking. She was far too shy. “I understand, Miss Parks.” “Call me Penny.” After dinner I drove her home and met her parents. “Mom, Dad, this is Mr. Knight.” “Pleased to meet you,” I said, shaking their hands. We all stared at each other. Then the walls. Then the floor. Lovely weather we’re having, isn’t it? “Well,” I said, tapping my watch, snapping my rubber bands, “it’s late, I’d better be going.” Her mother looked at a clock on the wall. “It’s only nine o’clock,” she said. “Some hot date.” JUST AFTER OUR second date Penny went with her parents to Hawaii for Christmas. She sent me a postcard, and I took this as a good sign. When she returned, her first day back at the office, I asked her again to dinner. It was early January 1968, a bitterly cold night.

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

  Title : Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike Author: Knight, Phil Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook. Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. [image "Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight, Scribner" file=image_rsrc3K8.jpg] For my grandchildren, so they will know In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. —Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind DAWNI was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my green running shoes. Then slipped quietly out the back door. I stretched my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back, and groaned as I took the first few balky steps down the cool road, into the fog. Why is it always so hard to get started? There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myself—though the trees seemed oddly aware of me. Then again, this was Oregon. The trees always seemed to know. The trees always had your back. What a beautiful place to be from, I thought, gazing around. Calm, green, tranquil—I was proud to call Oregon my home, proud to call little Portland my place of birth. But I felt a stab of regret, too. Though beautiful, Oregon struck some people as the kind of place where nothing big had ever happened, or was ever likely to. If we Oregonians were famous for anything, it was an old, old trail we’d had to blaze to get here. Since then, things had been pretty tame. The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of that trail often. It’s our birthright, he’d growl. Our character, our fate—our DNA. “The cowards never started,” he’d tell me, “and the weak died along the way—that leaves us.” Us. Some rare strain of pioneer spirit was discovered along that trail, my teacher believed, some outsized sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism—and it was our job as Oregonians to keep that strain alive. I’d nod, showing him all due respect. I loved the guy. But walking away I’d sometimes think: Jeez, it’s just a dirt road.

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

  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. On July 4, 1964, I sold out my first shipment. I wrote to Tiger and ordered nine hundred more. That would cost roughly three thousand dollars, which would wipe out my father’s petty cash, and patience. The Bank of Dad, he said, is now closed. He did agree, grudgingly, to give me a letter of guarantee, which I took down to the First National Bank of Oregon. On the strength of my father’s reputation, and nothing more, the bank approved the loan. My father’s vaunted respectability was finally paying dividends, at least for me. I HAD A venerable partner, a legitimate bank, and a product that was selling itself. I was on a roll. In fact, the shoes sold so well, I decided to hire another salesman. Maybe two. In California. The problem was, how to get to California? I certainly couldn’t afford airfare. And I didn’t have time to drive. So every other weekend I’d load a duffel bag with Tigers, put on my crispest army uniform, and head out to the local air base.

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

  “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 .” The howling grew louder. So Strasser picked up his binder and threw it against the wall. “Fuck all you guys,” he said. The binder burst open, pages flew everywhere, and the laughter was deafening. Even Strasser couldn’t help himself. He had to join in. Little wonder that Strasser’s nickname was Rolling Thunder. Hayes, meanwhile, was Doomsday. Woodell was Weight. (As in Dead Weight.) Johnson was Four Factor, because he tended to exaggerate and therefore everything he said needed to be divided by four. No one took it personally. The only thing truly not tolerated at a Buttface was a thin skin. And sobriety. At day’s end, when everybody had a scratchy throat from all the abusing and laughing and problem-solving, when our yellow legal pads were filled with ideas, solutions, quotations, and lists upon lists, we’d shift ground to the bar at the lodge and continue the meeting over drinks. Many drinks. The bar was called the Owl’s Nest.

• 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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was decked, in short, in all the colours of my own most handsome self - or, rather, I was decked to match it. This idea, I must confess, was disconcerting; for a second, Diana’s generosity began to seem less of a compliment than I had thought it, posed that morning before the glass.But all performers dress to suit their stages, I recalled. And what a stage was this - and what an audience!There were about thirty of them, I think - all women; all seated at tables, bearing drinks and books and papers. You might have passed any one of them upon the street, and thought nothing; but the effect of their appearance all combined was rather queer. They were dressed, not strangely, but somehow distinctly. They wore skirts - but the kind of skirts a tailor might design if he were set, for a dare, to sew a bustle for a gent. Many seemed clad in walking-suits or riding-habits. Many wore pince-nez, or carried monocles on ribbons. There were one or two rather startling coiffures; and there were more neckties than I had ever before seen brought together at an exclusively female ensemble.I did not notice all these details at once, of course; but the room was a large one and, since Diana took her time to lead me across it, I had leisure to gaze about me as she did so. We walked through a hush that was thick as bristling velvet - for, at our appearance at the door the lady members had turned their heads to stare, and then had goggled. Whether, like Miss Hawkins, they took me for a gentleman; or whether - like Diana - they had seen through my disguise at once, I cannot say. Either way, there was a cry - ‘Good gracious!’ - and then another exclamation, more lingering: ‘My word...’ I felt Diana stiffen at my side, with pure complacency.Then came another shout, as a lady at a table in the farthest corner rose to her feet. ‘Diana, you old roué! You have done it at last!’ She gave a clap. Beside her, two more ladies looked on, pink-faced. One of them had a monocle, and now she fixed it to her eye.Diana placed me before them all, and presented me - more graciously than she had introduced me to Miss Hawkins, but again as her ‘companion’; and the ladies laughed. The first of them, the one who had risen to greet us, now seized my hand. Her fingers held a stubby cigar.‘This, Nancy dear,’ said my mistress, ‘is Mrs Jex. She is quite my oldest friend in London - and quite the most disreputable.

• From Educated (2018)

  There was scarcely a person in the church that Dad hadn’t called a gentile—for visiting a doctor or for sending their kids to the public school—but that day he seemed to forget about California socialism and the Illuminati. He stood next to me, a hand on my shoulder, graciously collecting compliments. “We’re very blessed,” he kept saying. “Very blessed.” Papa Jay crossed the chapel and paused in front of our pew. He said I sang like one of God’s own angels. Dad looked at him for a moment, then his eyes began to shine and he shook Papa Jay’s hand like they were old friends. I’d never seen this side of my father, but I would see it many times after—every time I sang. However long he’d worked in the junkyard, he was never too tired to drive across the valley to hear me. However bitter his feelings toward socialists like Papa Jay, they were never so bitter that, should those people praise my voice, Dad wouldn’t put aside the great battle he was fighting against the Illuminati long enough to say, “Yes, God has blessed us, we’re very blessed.” It was as if, when I sang, Dad forgot for a moment that the world was a frightening place, that it would corrupt me, that I should be kept safe, sheltered, at home. He wanted my voice to be heard. The theater in town was putting on a play, Annie, and my teacher said that if the director heard me sing, he would give me the lead. Mother warned me not to get my hopes up. She said we couldn’t afford to drive the twelve miles to town four nights a week for rehearsals, and that even if we could, Dad would never allow me to spend time in town, alone, with who knows what kind of people. I practiced the songs anyway because I liked them. One evening, I was in my room singing, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow,” when Dad came in for supper. He chewed his meatloaf quietly, and listened. “I’ll find the money,” he told Mother when they went to bed that night. “You get her to that audition.” [image "Chapter 9 Perfect in His Generations" file=Image00011.jpg] The summer I sang the lead for Annie it was 1999. My father was in serious preparedness mode. Not since I was five, and the Weavers were under siege, had he been so certain that the Days of Abomination were upon us. Dad called it Y2K. On January 1, he said, computer systems all over the world would fail. There would be no electricity, no telephones. All would sink into chaos, and this would usher in the Second Coming of Christ. “How do you know the day?” I asked. Dad said that the Government had programmed the computers with a six-digit calendar, which meant the year had only two digits. “When nine-nine becomes oh-oh,” he said, “the computers won’t know what year it is.

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

  The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher—and none of us wavered in the belief that “stakes” didn’t mean “money.” For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to- day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living—and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me. THERE WAS NO time to unpack. There was no time to get over our post-China jet lag, which was profound. As we returned to Oregon, the process of going public was in full swing. Big choices needed to be made. Especially: who was going to manage the offering. Public offerings don’t always succeed. On the contrary, when mismanaged, they turn into train wrecks. So this was a critical decision right out of the blocks. Chuck, having worked at Kuhn, Loeb, still had strong relationships with their people, and thought they’d be best. We interviewed four or five other firms but in the end decided to go with Chuck’s instincts. He hadn’t steered us wrong yet. Next we had to create a prospectus. 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

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

  Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.” Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity. That’s why, haunted as I was by the Vietnam War, I always vowed that someday Nike would have a factory in or near Saigon. By 1997 we had four. I was very proud. And when I learned that we were to be honored and celebrated by the Vietnamese government as one of the nation’s top five generators of foreign currency, I felt that I simply had to visit. What a wrenching trip. I don’t know if I’d appreciated the full depth of my hatred for the war in Vietnam until I returned twenty-five years after the peace, until I joined hands with our former antagonists. At one point my hosts graciously asked what they could do for me, what would make my trip special or memorable. I got a lump in my throat. I didn’t want them to go to any trouble, I said. But they insisted. Okay, I said, okay, I’d like to meet eighty-six-year-old General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the Vietnamese MacArthur, the man who single-handedly defeated the Japanese, the French, the Americans, and the Chinese. My hosts stared in amazed silence. Slowly they rose and excused themselves and stood off in a corner, conversing in frantic Vietnamese. After five minutes they came back. Tomorrow, they said. One hour. I bowed deeply. Then counted the minutes until the big meeting. The first thing I noticed as General Giáp entered the room was his size. This brilliant fighter, this genius tactician who’d organized the Tet Offensive, who’d planned those miles and miles of underground tunnels, this giant of history, came up to my shoulders. He was, maybe, five foot four. And humble. No corncob pipe for Giáp. I remember that he wore a dark business suit, like mine. I remember that he smiled as I did—shyly, uncertainly. But there was an intensity about him. I’d seen that kind of glittery confidence in great coaches, and great business leaders, the elite of the elite. I never saw it in a mirror. He knew I had questions. He waited for me to ask them.

• From City of Night (1963)

  They call me up—I had a call from a youngman in Seattle the other day. He’d heard about me, through friends—and he wanted to come down especially to see me. Why, I get calls all the time from Los Angeles.... And, well, Whu-I NOT?” He attempted another shrug, again frustrated. Dreamily: “I like to see youngmen coming out—I like to see them—well, flower out—...Rather,” he corrected himself hastily, “I like to see them burst out Violently! And I watch them move in the direction they were meant to go. Theyre like Disciples, discovering The Way.... Sometimes,” he said wistfully, assuming a benign look as he gathered his hands over the photographs on his lap, “sometimes—I get the feeling that Im something of a—... yes, something of a Saint.” I look at “The Saint” in the strange costume. His stare challenges mine. With a flourish, he spreads the photographs on a table before me as proudly as a peacock spreads his tail. There are youngmen dressed as military officers of long-ago periods, cowboys, motorcyclists, policemen, pirates, gladiators.... Single, they seem to have menaced the camera. In groups, they depict scenes of violence.... I lay the pictures down without looking at the rest. “I took every one of them myself,” he sighed. The cat had returned surreptitiously, winding in and out of Neil’s legs. Again, he shoved it away with his boot, this time much more violently. He watched as the cat moves away. “And now!” Neil announced. “Ill show you My Real Collection!—the most complete in California—and (Whu-I NOT) possibly in the United States!—though Ive heard theres a man near Griffith Park in Los Angeles who has a pretty good collection,” he condescended. “His name is—... Dan? Stan? Something like that. But Ive been told hes not at all like Me!” He ushered me into the bedroom. When he pushed open the door, past which I thought I had seen an unmoving foot earlier, I start. There are two men in the bedroom: a policeman wearing sun-glasses and a motorcyclist, legs spread, hands planted on hips, his head thrust forward as if ready to attack with gloved, clenched fists. Seeing me start, Neil laughs. “Theyre manikins!” he announced triumphantly at the deliberate deception. “They look terribly real, dont they?” He went fondly to the dummy dressed as a policeman, and he adjusted the cap, to one side; to the motorcyclist now and changed his stance, lowering the head to emphasize further the impending thrust. “I prefer this one.” He indicated the motorcyclist. “He looks more—oh, Rough!” The room has about it a twilight darkness—the same indefinite antiqueness as the living-room. The bed is covered with a shiny black-leather spread.

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

  Welcome to the human mind. If we try to avoid sin by reminding ourselves day by day not to lie or not to cheat or not to steal or not to pour that third glass of wine or not to hide that shopping bag from our spouse or not to fudge that expense report at work or not to sneak a second serving of cheesecake after everyone else has gone to bed, then guess what we’re going to focus on? Far better to focus on what will pull us forward than try to focus on what won’t push us back. That singular thought—I choose to serve —leads to our taking risks on Jesus’s behalf, which leads to our taking our eyes off ourselves and to seeing the needs of others for a change, which leads to our taking action to the glory of God, which leads to our depending more and more on divine strength from our Father, which leads to a deeper longing to worship Him. Those moments of unbounded worship then prompt us to long for even greater spiritual adventures, which makes us willing to take yet another risk. That risk would lead to more service, dependency, and so on. Now, that’s a spiral I can get behind. But it won’t start until we choose to run. Until we choose to serve. Until we choose to stop prioritizing personal comfort and instead help meet others’ needs. When we serve, everything shifts. It shifts for the better—and fast. I believe that single-mindedness comes as we risk for God, as we step out of our comfort zones and move into the things He’s called us to. Run the race set before us. We need God, and we don’t have time for our sin and our baggage and our burden because we are doing our best to follow and obey our God and do the important work that may feel insignificant on any given day. My husband’s college football coaches used to say, “You can make mistakes. Mistakes we can fix. But you’d better go at this with 110 percent. There is nothing that can happen without effort.” Friend, you and I need to be people who single-mindedly reject complacency and want God more than anything else on earth. Such surrender frees us from any worry about making mistakes or failing to look like those around us. First Corinthians is so clear about this. If you’re an elbow and you’re not being an elbow in the church, the body is not well. That should bug you! In some way that should make you crazy, because you should wonder whether you’re making the whole body of Christ sick. That’s what I had to come to whenever doubts crept in and suggested that maybe I was wasting my energy in ministry. This wasn’t about me. My job was to obey God, and His job was to change lives.

• From Educated (2018)

  I thought of something Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, had told me over the phone a few days before. She said it had taken her years to convince Tyler to let her immunize their children, because some part of him still believed vaccines are a conspiracy by the Medical Establishment. Remembering that now, with Dad’s voice still ringing in my ears, I sneered at my brother. He’s a scientist! I wrote. How can he not see beyond their paranoia! I reread what I had written, and as I did so my scorn gave way to a sense of irony. Then again, I wrote. Perhaps I could mock Tyler with more credibility if I had not remembered, as I did just now, that to this day I have never been immunized. — MY INTERVIEW FOR THE Gates scholarship took place at St. John’s College in Annapolis. The campus was intimidating, with its immaculate lawns and crisp colonial architecture. I sat nervously in the corridor, waiting to be called in for my interview; I felt stiff in the pantsuit and clung awkwardly to Robin’s handbag. But in the end, Professor Steinberg had written such a powerful letter of recommendation that there was little left for me to do. I received confirmation the next day: I’d won the scholarship. The phone calls began—from BYU’s student paper and the local news. I did half a dozen interviews. I was on TV. I awoke one morning to find my picture plastered on BYU’s home page. I was the third BYU student ever to win a Gates scholarship, and the university was taking full advantage of the press. I was asked about my high school experience, and which of my grade school teachers had prepared me for my success. I dodged, I parried, I lied when I had to. I didn’t tell a single reporter that I’d never gone to school. I didn’t know why I couldn’t tell them. I just couldn’t stand the thought of people patting me on the back, telling me how impressive I was. I didn’t want to be Horatio Alger in someone’s tear-filled homage to the American dream. I wanted my life to make sense, and nothing in that narrative made sense to me. — A MONTH BEFORE MY graduation, I visited Buck’s Peak. Dad had read the

• From Educated (2018)

  favorite that if she departed in any way from the usual script, we’d tell it for her. “I told him to pay attention to the actual words they were shouting. Everyone sounded mad as hornets, but really they were having a lovely conversation. You had to listen to what they were saying, not how they were saying it. I told him, That’s just how Westovers talk!” By the time she’d finished we were usually on the floor. We’d cackle until our ribs hurt, imagining our prim, professorial uncle meeting Dad’s unruly crew. Lynn found the scene so distasteful he never went back, and in my whole life I never saw him on the mountain. Served him right, we thought, for his meddling, for trying to draw Mother back into that world of gabardine dresses and cream shoes. We understood that the dissolution of Mother’s family was the inauguration of ours. The two could not exist together. Only one could have her. Mother never told us that her family had opposed the engagement but we knew. There were traces the decades hadn’t erased. My father seldom set foot in Grandma-over-in-town’s house, and when he did he was sullen and stared at the door. As a child I scarcely knew my aunts, uncles or cousins on my mother’s side. We rarely visited them—I didn’t even know where most of them lived—and it was even rarer for them to visit the mountain. The exception was my aunt Angie, my mother’s youngest sister, who lived in town and insisted on seeing my mother. What I know about the engagement has come to me in bits and pieces, mostly from the stories Mother told. I know she had the ring before Dad served a mission—which was expected of all faithful Mormon men—and spent two years proselytizing in Florida. Lynn took advantage of this absence to introduce his sister to every marriageable man he could find this side of the Rockies, but none could make her forget the stern farm boy who ruled over his own mountain. Gene returned from Florida and they were married. LaRue sewed the wedding dress. — I’VE ONLY SEEN A single photograph from the wedding. It’s of my parents posing in front of a gossamer curtain of pale ivory. Mother is wearing a traditional dress of beaded silk and venetian lace, with a neckline that sits

• From Educated (2018)

  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. I had retreated, fled across an ocean and allowed my father to tell my story for me, to define me to everyone I had ever known. I had conceded too much ground—not just the mountain, but the entire province of our shared history. It was time to go home.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘Bennet is the name, initials E. A.,’ wrote White to Leonard Potts, his old tutor at Cambridge, who was something of a father figure. ‘He is a very great man – must be, because cured cases like mine are I believe most rare, if not unique.’ And then there’s an assurance that is surely his wishful invention of some future self: ‘I had a friend who was a sadistic homosexual, now happily married with children.’ For the last year, White’s craze for analysis had been in full spate: he was certain that Bennet would cure him of all of it: his homosexuality, his unhappiness, his sense of feeling unreal, his sadism, all of it; all his confusions and fears. It was all going well. He was almost sure he was in love with the barmaid. ‘I’m so happy I hop about like a wagtail in the streets,’ he told Potts, with a pride that holds within it, cupped like a small bird in the hand, his abject terror of failure. The boys treated him with a kind of holy awe. Pacing the long corridors in grey flannels, a turtleneck sweater and gown, Mr White looked a little like Byron. He was tall, with full lips and very pale blue eyes, a trim red moustache, and dark, unruly hair. He did all the right things: flew aeroplanes, shot, fished for salmon, hunted; and even better, all the wrong things: kept grass snakes in his room, rode his horse up the school steps on match days, and best of all, published racy novels under the pseudonym James Aston. When the headmaster found out he was furious: Mr White had to write him a letter promising never to write such filth again, said the boys, who passed copies of the novels around in agonies of delighted subterfuge. He was a startling, light-hearted, sarcastic figure But a forbidding teacher. He never beat boys, ever, but they were terrified of his disdain. He demanded emotional sincerity. If it wasn’t forthcoming, he’d cut his pupils down to size, puncturing their new-grown armour of pretension with a relish that bordered on cruelty. Even so there was something about Mr White that made him an ally of sorts; boys confided in him in a crisis, and they worshipped him for his insubordination and glamour. They knew he didn’t fit, not quite, with the rest of the masters at Stowe. Did you hear about the time he crashed his Bentley into a farmhouse and nearly died? they whispered. And they spoke gleefully of the legendary Monday morning when Mr White arrived late and hungover, ordered the class to write an essay on the dangers of the demon drink, put his feet on his desk, and fell fast asleep.

• From Educated (2018)

  Construction began on the milking barn in Oneida. Shawn designed and welded the main frame—the massive beams that formed the skeleton of the building. They were too heavy for the loader; only a crane could lift them. It was a delicate procedure, requiring the welders to balance on opposite ends of a beam while it was lowered onto columns, then welded in place. Shawn surprised everyone when he announced that he wanted me to operate the crane. “Tara can’t drive the crane,” Dad said. “It’ll take half the morning to teach her the controls, and she still won’t know what the hell she’s doing.” “But she’ll be careful,” Shawn said, “and I’m done falling off shit.” An hour later I was in the man box, and Shawn and Luke were standing on either end of a beam, twenty feet in the air. I brushed the lever lightly, listening as the hydraulic cylinders hissed softly to protract. “Hold!” Shawn shouted when the beam was in place, then they nodded their helmets down and began to weld. My operating the crane was one of a hundred disputes between Dad and Shawn that Shawn won that summer. Most were not resolved so peacefully. They argued nearly every day—about a flaw in the schematics or a tool that had been left at home. Dad seemed eager to fight, to prove

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It’s not a happy face, but it’s not unhappy either. Tense, certainly. It is fierce, ambivalent and brave. Today she’d come out to watch the hawk fly and in a burst of inspiration I decided to recruit her as my under-falconer. She’d borne my grief-spurred strangenesses with great good grace over the last few months but nothing could have prepared her for this. ‘The problem is, I can’t get away fast enough,’ I tell her. ‘She flies after me as soon as I start walking away. But she has to come longer distances before I can fly her loose. Can you hold her for me, out on the pitch, so I can call her from your fist?’ ‘You’ll have to show me how,’ she says, paling. ‘It’s easy, really.’ I give her my spare glove, put the hawk on it and bend her fingers into the right shape to hold the jesses. ‘Turn your back to me – yes, like that. Perfect. Now she can’t see me. So I’m going to walk over there. When I shout OK, turn right, stick out your arm and open your hand, so she can fly.’ She bites her lip, nods. ‘Make sure you turn the right way; you don’t want to get the creance caught round your legs.’ She holds the hawk with cautious concentration, as if it were a pitcher full of some caustic agent. She stands straight-backed, still and composed, a small figure fifteen yards away in skinny black jeans, T-shirt and bright red sneakers. ‘OK!’ She turns, and Mabel bursts towards me, dragging the creance behind her, flying so low her wing-tips almost brush the turf. With each deep wingbeat her body flexes and swings but her eyes and head are perfectly, gyroscopically, still, fixed and focused on my glove. The silvered undersides of her wings flash as she spreads them wide, her tail flares, she brings her feet up to strike and she hits the glove feet-first like a kickboxer. ‘Was that OK?’ shouts Christina. I give her a thumbs-up, and she responds the same way: for a moment we are two traffic controllers on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. We do it again. And again. The next day brings heavy rain so we fly her loose between us in the front room of my house, back and forth from fist to fist, over the rug, past the mirror, under the light, wings sending up draughts that leave the lampshade swinging wildly. By the fourth day the hawk is flying twenty-five yards to me, will come without hesitation from the ground, from Christina’s fist, from tree branches, from the roof of the pavilion. ‘Thank you so much for your help,’ I tell her as we walk from the field. ‘You know, I think we’re nearly there. Once she flies a full fifty yards I’ll let her loose.’

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

  Calvin was thus brought into direct conflict with the Council, and forced to the alternative of submission or disobedience; in the latter case he ran the risk of a second and final expulsion. But he was not the man to yield in such a crisis. He resolved to oppose to the Council his inflexible non possumus. On the Sunday which followed the absolution of Berthelier, the September communion was to be celebrated. Calvin preached as usual in St. Peter’s, and declared at the close of the sermon that he would never profane the sacrament by administering it to an excommunicated person. Then raising his voice and lifting up his hands, he exclaimed in the words of St. Chrysostom: "I will lay down my life ere these hands shall reach forth the sacred things of God to those who have been branded as his despisers." This was another moment of sublime Christian heroism. Perrin, who had some decent feeling of respect for religion and for Calvin’s character, was so much impressed by this solemn warning that he secretly gave orders to Berthelier not to approach the communion table. The communion was celebrated, as Beza reports, "in profound silence, and under a solemn awe, as if the Deity himself had been visibly present among them."770 In the afternoon, Calvin, as for the last time, preached on Paul’s farewell address to the Ephesian Elders (Acts 20:31); he exhorted the congregation to abide in the doctrine of Christ, and declared his willingness to serve the Church and each of its members, but added in conclusion: "Such is the state of things here that this may be my last sermon to you; for they who are in power would force me to do what God does not permit. I must, therefore, dearly beloved, like Paul, commend you to God, and to the Word of his grace."771 These words made a deep impression even upon his worst foes. The next day Calvin, with his colleagues and the Presbytery, demanded of the Council to grant them an audience before the people, as a law was attacked which had been sanctioned by the General Assembly. The Council refused the request, but resolved to suspend the decree by which the power of excommunication was declared to belong to the Council. In the midst of this agitation the trial of Servetus was going on, and was brought to a close by his death at the stake, Oct. 27. A few days afterwards (Nov. 3), Berthelier renewed his request to be admitted to the Lord’s Table—he who despised religion. The Council which had condemned the heretic, was not quite willing to obey Calvin as a legislator, and wished to retain the power of excommunication in their own hands. Yet, in order to avoid a rupture with the ministers, who would not yield to any compromise, the Council resolved to solicit the opinions of four Swiss cantons on the subject.772