Surprise

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 53 of 73 · 20 per page

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

  The one person who seemed to be having an uncomplicatedly wonderful time was Kitami. Gone was the angry Kitami from the bank. Gone was the scolding Kitami from my office. Talking, laughing, slapping his knee, he was so personable that I wondered what might have happened if I’d given him a mai tai before driving him over to First National. Late in the evening he spotted something across the room—a guitar. It belonged to one of Bowerman’s three sons. Kitami walked over, picked it up, and began to finger the strings. Then strum them. He carried the guitar to a short flight of steps that led from the Bowermans’ sunken living room to their dining room and, standing on the top step, started to play. And sing. All heads turned. Conversation ceased. It was a country-western song, of some sort, but Kitami performed it like a traditional Japanese folk song. He sounded like Buck Owens on a koto harp. Then without any segue he switched to “O Sole Mio.” I recall thinking: Is he really singing “O Sole Mio”? He sang it louder. O sole mio, sta nfronte a te! O sole, o sole mio, sta nfronte a te! A Japanese businessman, strumming a Western guitar, singing an Italian ballad, in the voice of an Irish tenor. It was surreal, then a few miles past surreal, and it didn’t stop. I’d never known there were so many verses to “O Sole Mio.” I’d never known a roomful of active, restless Oregonians could sit so still and quiet for so long. When he set down the guitar, we all tried not to make eye contact with each other as we gave him a big hand. I clapped and clapped and it all made sense. For Kitami, this trip to the United States—the visit to the bank, the meetings with me, the dinner with the Bowermans—wasn’t about Blue Ribbon. Nor was it about Onitsuka. Like everything else, it was all about Kitami. KITAMI LEFT PORTLAND the next day on his not-so-secret mission, his Give-Blue-Ribbon-the-Brush-Off tour of America. I asked again about his destination, and again he didn’t answer. Yoi tabi de arimas yoh ni, I said. Safe travels. I’d recently commissioned Hayes, my old boss from Price Waterhouse, to do some consulting work for Blue Ribbon, and now I huddled with him and tried to decide my next move before Kitami’s return. We agreed that the best thing to do was keep the peace, try to convince Kitami not to leave us, not to abandon us. As

• From The Case for God (2009)

  54 He is still asking the primordial question: Why is there something rather than nothing? Modern physicists have more information than our ancestors could have dreamed of, but unlike Dawkins, they do not all dismiss this query as redundant or pointless. Human beings seem framed to pose problems for themselves that they cannot solve, pit themselves against the dark world of uncreated reality, and find that living with such unknowing is a source of astonishment and delight. Philosophy, theology, and mythology have always responded to the science of the day, and a philosophical movement has developed since the 1980s that has embraced the indeterminacy of the new cosmology. Postmodern thinking is heir to Hume and Kant in its assumption that what we call reality is constructed by the mind and that all human understanding is therefore interpretation rather than the acquisition of accurate, objective information. From this it follows that no single vision can be sovereign; that our knowledge is relative, subjective, and fallible rather than certain and absolute; and that truth is inherently ambiguous. Received ideas that are the products of a particular historical and cultural milieu must, therefore, be stringently deconstructed. But this analysis must not be based on any absolute principle, and there is no assurance that we will ever arrive at—or even approximate—a wholly accurate version of the truth. Fundamental to postmodern thought is the conviction that instead of ideologies mirroring external conditions, the world is profoundly affected by the ideology that human beings impose upon it. We are not forced by sense data to adopt a particular worldview, so we have a choice in what we affirm—as well as an immense responsibility. Postmodernists are particularly suspicious of Big Stories. They regard Western history as scarred by the ceaseless compulsion to impose a totalizing system on the world. Sometimes this has been theological and has resulted in crusade and persecution, but the “stories” have also been scientific, economic, ideological, and political, resulting in the technological domination of nature and the sociopolitical subjection of others in slavery, genocide, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and the oppression of women and other minorities. So, like Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, postmodernists seek to deflate such beliefs but without attempting to substitute an absolute “story” of their own. Postmodernism is iconoclastic, therefore. As one of its early luminaries, Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), explained, it can be defined as “the incredulity towards grand narratives ( grands récits).”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  During the sixties, the youth revolution was in part a protest against the illegitimate domination of rational discourse and the suppression of mythos by logos . But because the understanding of the traditional ways of arriving at more intuitive knowledge had been neglected in the West during the modern period, the sixties quest for spirituality was often wild, self-indulgent, and unbalanced. It was, therefore, premature to speak of the death of religion, and this became evident in the late 1970s, when confidence in the imminent arrival of the Secular City was shattered by a dramatic religious resurgence. In 1978–79, the Western world watched in astonishment as an obscure Iranian ayatollah brought down the regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–80), which had seemed to be one of the most progressive and stable in the Middle East. At the same time as governments applauded the peace initiative of President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt (1918–81), observers noted that young Egyptians were donning Islamic dress, casting aside the freedoms of modernity, and engaging in a takeover of university campuses in order to reclaim them for religion—in a way that was paradoxically reminiscent of student rebellions during the sixties. In Israel, an aggressively religious form of Zionism (which had originally been a defiantly secular movement) had risen to political prominence, and the ultra-Orthodox parties, which David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Israel’s first prime minister, had confidently predicted would fade away once the Jewish people had their own secular state, were gathering strength. In the United States, Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) founded the Moral Majority in 1979, urging Protestant fundamentalists to get involved in politics and to challenge any state or federal legislation that pushed a “secular humanist” agenda. This militant religiosity, which would emerge in every region where a secular, Western-style government had separated religion and politics, is determined to drag God and/or religion from the sidelines to which they have been relegated in modern culture and back to center field. It reveals a widespread disappointment in modernity. Whatever the pundits, intellectuals, or politicians thought, people all over the world were demonstrating that they wanted to see religion more clearly reflected in public life. This new form of piety is popularly known as “fundamentalism,” but many object to having this Christian term foisted on their reform movements. They do not in fact represent an atavistic return to the past. These are essentially innovative movements and could have taken root at no time other than our own. Fundamentalisms too can be seen as part of the postmodern rejection of modernity. They are not orthodox and conservative; indeed, many are actually anti-orthodox and regard the more conventional faithful as part of the problem. 6 These movements have mushroomed independently, and even those that have emerged within the same tradition do not have an identical vision.

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

  “No more shoes to drop.” ITO AND SUMERAGI were back at 9:00 a.m. the next morning, and took up their places in the conference room. I went around the office and told everyone, “It’s almost over. Just hang on. Just a little longer. There’s nothing else for them to find.” Not long after they’d arrived, Sumeragi stood, stretched, and looked as if he was going to step outside for a smoke. He motioned to me. A word? We walked down the hall to my office. “I fear this audit is worse than you realize,” he said. “What—why?” I said. “Because,” he said, “I delayed... I sometimes did not put invoices through right away.” “You did what now?” I said. Hangdog, Sumeragi explained that he’d been worried about us, that he’d tried to help us manage our credit problems by hiding Nissho’s invoices in a drawer. He’d held them back, not sent them on through to his accounting people, until he felt we had enough cash to pay them, which in turn made it appear on the Nissho books that their credit exposure to us was much lower than it actually was. In other words, all this time we’d been stressing about paying Nissho on time, and we were never paying them on time, because Sumeragi wasn’t invoicing us on time, thinking he was helping. “This is bad,” I said to Sumeragi. “Yes,” he said, relighting a Lucky Strike, “is bad, Buck. Is very very bad.” I marched him back to the conference room and together we told Ito, who was, of course, appalled. At first he suspected Sumeragi of acting at our behest. I couldn’t blame him. A conspiracy was the most logical explanation. In his place I would’ve thought the same thing. But Sumeragi, who looked as if he was about to prostrate himself before Ito, swore on his life that he’d been acting independently, that he’d gone rogue. “Why you do such a thing?” Ito demanded. “Because I think Blue Ribbon could be great success,” Sumeragi said, “maybe $20 million account. I shake hands many times with Mr. Steve Prefontaine. I shake hands with Mr. Bill Bowerman. I go many times to Trail Blazer game with Mr. Phil Knight. I even pack orders at warehouse. Nike is my business child. Always it is nice to see one’s business child grow.” “So then,” Ito said, “you hide invoices because... you... like these men?” Deeply ashamed, Sumeragi bowed his head. “Hai,” he said. “Hai.” I HAD NO idea what Ito might do. But I couldn’t stick around to find out. I suddenly had another problem. My two angriest creditors had just landed. Shesky from Bostonian and Manowitz from Mano were both on the ground, in Portland, headed our way. Quickly, I gathered everyone in my office and gave them their final orders. “Folks—we’re going to Code Red. This building, this forty-five-hundred-square-foot building, is about to be swarming with people to whom we owe money.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  A spirit of curiosity, far from sudden, since I do not know when I was without it, prompted me, without any particular suspicion, or other drift or view, to see what they were, and examine their persons and behaviour. The partition of our rooms was one of those moveable ones that, when taken down, served occasionally to lay them into one, for the conveniency of as larger company; and now, my nicest search could not shew me the shadow of a peep-hole, a circumstance which probably had not escaped the review of the parties on the other side, whom much it stood upon not to be deceived in it; but at length I observed a paper patch of the same colour as the wainscot, which I took to conceal some flaw; but then it was so high, that I was obliged to stand upon a chair to reach it, which I did as soft as possible, and, with a point of a bodkin, soon pierced it, and opened myself espial room sufficient. And now, applying my eye close, I commanded the room perfectly, and could see my two young sparks romping and pulling one another about, entirely, to my imagination, in frolic and innocent play. The eldest might be, on my nearest guess, towards nineteen, a tall comely young man, in a white fustian frock, with a green velvet cape, and cut bob-wig. The youngest could not be above seventeen, fair, ruddy, completely well made, and to say the truth, a sweet pretty stripling: he was too, I fancy, a country lad, by his dress, which was a green plush frock, and breeches of the same, white waistcoat and stockings, a jockey cap, with his yellowish hair, long and loose, in natural curls. But after a look of circumspection, which I saw the eldest cast every way round the room, probably in too much hurry and heat not to overlook the very small opening I was posted at, especially at the height it was, whilst my eye close to it kept the light from shining through and betraying it, he said something to his companion that presently changed the face of things. For now the elder began to embrace, to press and kiss the younger, to put his hands into his bosom, and give him such manifest signs of an amorous intention, as made me conclude the other to be a girl in disguise: a mistake that nature kept me in countenance for, for she had certainly made one, when she gave him the male stamp. In the rashness then of their age, and bent as they were to accomplish their project of preposterous pleasure, at the risk of the very worst of consequences, where a discovery was nothing less than improbable, they now proceeded to such lengths as soon satisfied me what they were.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  As soon as she was gone, the table was removed from the middle, and became a side-board; a couch was brought into its place, of which when I whisperingly inquired the reason, of my particular, he told me, “that as it was chiefly on my account that his convention was met, the parties intended at once to humour their taste of variety in pleasures, and by an open public enjoyment, to see me broke of any taint of reserve or modesty, which they looked on as the poison of joy; that though they occasionally preached pleasure, and lived up to the text, they did not enthusiastically set up for missionaries, and only indulged themselves in the delights of a practical instruction of all the pretty women they liked well enough to bestow it upon, and who fell properly in the way of it; but that as such a proposal might be too violent, too shocking for a young beginner, the old standers were to set an example, which he hoped I would not be averse to follow, since it was to him I was devolved in favour of the first experiment; but that still I was perfectly at my liberty to refuse the party, which being in its nature one of pleasure, supposed an exclusion of all force or constraint.” My countenance expressed, no doubt, my surprise as my silence did my acquiescence. I was now embarked, and thoroughly determined on any voyage the company would take me on.

• From Educated (2018)

  “People take drugs for pain,” he said. “It’s normal .” I must have winced at the word “normal,” because he went quiet. He filled a glass of water and set it in front of me, then gently pushed the pills forward until they touched my arm. I picked one up. I’d never seen a pill up close before. It was smaller than I’d expected. I swallowed it, then the other. For as long as I could remember, whenever I was in pain, whether from a cut or a toothache, Mother would make a tincture of lobelia and skullcap. It had never lessened the pain, not one degree. Because of this, I had come to respect pain, even revere it, as necessary and untouchable. Twenty minutes after I swallowed the red pills, the earache was gone. I couldn’t comprehend its absence. I spent the afternoon swinging my head from left to right, trying to jog the pain loose again. I thought if I could shout loudly enough, or move quickly enough, perhaps the earache would return and I would know the medicine had been a sham after all. Charles watched in silence but he must have found my behavior absurd, especially when I began to pull on my ear, which still ached dully, so I could test the limits of this strange witchcraft. —MOTHER WAS SUPPOSED TO drive me to BYU the next morning, but during the night, she was called to deliver a baby. There was a car sitting in the driveway—a Kia Sephia Dad had bought from Tony a few weeks before. The keys were in the ignition. I loaded my stuff into it and drove it to Utah, figuring the car would just about make up for the money Dad owed me. I guess he figured that, too, because he never said a word about it. I moved into an apartment half a mile from the university. I had new roommates. Robin was tall and athletic, and the first time I saw her she was wearing running shorts that were much too short, but I didn’t gape at her. When I met Jenni she was drinking a Diet Coke. I didn’t stare at that, either, because I’d seen Charles drink dozens of them. Robin was the oldest, and for some reason she was sympathetic to me. Somehow she understood that my missteps came from ignorance, not intention, and she corrected me gently but frankly. She told me exactly what I would need to do, or not do, to get along with the other girls in the apartment. No keeping rotten food in the cupboards or leaving rancid dishes in the sink. Robin explained this at an apartment meeting. When she’d finished another roommate, Megan, cleared her throat. “I’d like to remind everyone to wash their hands after they use the bathroom,” she said. “And not just with water, but with soap.” Robin rolled her eyes.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  The first scholar to publish an edition of the Greek New Testament was a famous humanist scholar from Rotterdam named Erasmus. Erasmus was the first to publish a Greek New Testament based on surviving Greek manuscripts, and when he published his New Testament, his reading of | John, chapter 5, verse 7 was different from the traditional reading. The traditional reading found in the Latin Vulgate was this business that there were three that testify, the heavenly Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and that the three were one. The traditional Latin reading was the reading that included the Trinity. When Erasmus published his Greek New Testament, however, it was worded differently. When he published his Greek New Testament, it said: “There are three that testify: The spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three agree.” In other words, it took out the phrasing about the three: “The Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one.” Erasmus did not include that in his Greek New Testament in | John, chapter 5, because he didn’t know of any Greek manuscript that had that wording in the text. He suspected that when the Latin Vulgate had been produced, that verse had been inserted into the text by somebody who subscribed to the doctrine of the Trinity. Well, this caused quite a furor in the early 16'" century. His edition of the New Testament was published in 1516, and theologians of the church were quite incensed, because Erasmus had taken out the one verse that referred to the Trinity, and they thought that this was a heretical undertaking. They therefore attacked Erasmus for getting rid of the Trinity. There’s a story that may be apocryphal, or may be historically right, that Erasmus responded to his critics by saying that if they could produce a Greek manuscript that had these words in it, he would put them in his next edition of the Greek New Testament, and his opponents, in response, in fact did produce a Greek New Testament. In fact, they produced a Greek manuscript with these words in it, and true to his word, then, Erasmus inserted these words in his future edition of his New Testament, so that in the new Greek version, it had the words, that “there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, Word, and Spirit, and these three are one.” That was the edition of the Greek New Testament from Erasmus that the King James translators used to translate the Bible into English, so that these verses, then, are found in the King James version of the Bible, although in most modern translations, scholars have recognized that, in fact, these verses were not original to the text. They were inserted later by a scribe who believed in the Trinity.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  To my surprise, people almost always made the call one way or another, even though their conclusion as to my gender often differed from person to person. For instance, it was common for me to go into a store and have an employee say, “Can I help you, sir?” Then a few minutes later, as I was leaving, a different employee might say, “Have a good day, ma’am.” After about a month or two of never knowing whether any given person was gendering me as female or male, I experienced a dramatic change. It felt like the world suddenly shifted around me. Almost overnight, I sensed that everything was very different. At first, I suspected that this feeling was coming from within me, perhaps a psychological or emotional change related to my being on female hormones. But then I realized that it wasn’t me, but rather the rest of the world, that was acting differently. In public, strangers began standing much closer to me. Women seemed to let their guard down around me. Men, for no apparent reason, would smile at me. Everybody spoke to me differently, interacted with me in different ways. I realized that I had passed through some sort of threshold and suddenly everybody saw me as female. The weirdest part about this experience was that I was pretty much the exact same person that I had been prior to that. I was acting and dressing the same. And over the four months I’d been on hormones, I had barely changed physically. I still had some stubble growing out of my face (although not nearly as much as before). My breasts were sore and tingling and definitely beginning to grow, but they were hardly noticeable. The only visible changes were the softening of my complexion and a little extra facial fat around my cheeks, and yet I completely lost my ability to “pass” as a man quite suddenly. Granted, my transition went a lot quicker than it does for many trans women, since I started out as a small, long-haired boy who was occasionally “ma’am”ed even before taking hormones. Nevertheless, the speed and extent of my transition, and the fact that it occurred without my having to change my behavior or mannerisms, challenged everything I used to believe to be true about gender. My initial reaction to this experience was to even further embrace my “genderqueerness”—my sense of otherness. The taken-for-granted assumption that female and male were fixed and reliable states suddenly appeared to me to be the product of a mass hallucination, held together only by the fact that so few people actually had the firsthand experience of transitioning—of seeing how such small differences in one’s physical gender can result in such a large difference in the way one is perceived and treated by others. Suddenly, I no longer felt like I was journeying from one gender to the other.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  If one wants to know what Jesus said and did, it might be useful to look at sources other than what his followers set about him. It might be useful, for example, to see what his enemies had to say about him, and so, one might go through a library and try to find ancient sources. Did Pontius Pilate say anything about Jesus? How about Caesar Augustus? What kind of birth records do we have? What kinds of accounts of his death do we have? What were his enemies saying about him? His Jewish enemies? His pagan enemies? When I was teaching at Rutgers University in the 1980s, I had a student who decided he wanted to do a senior thesis, and his idea was that he would go to the library and find old sources that mentioned Jesus that are not found in the New Testament, and he would see what they had to say about him, and he would come up with something new that nobody else had seen before. I had to inform this student that, in fact, this thought had occurred to people, to see what else had been written about Jesus, and I had to tell him that, in fact, he probably wasn’t going to find very much. If we look at the sources on Jesus written by Romans—non-Christian Romans who were neither Jewish nor Christian—if we look at the sources written in the first century, we have hundreds of sources. We have writings of poets, philosophers, religion scholars, natural scientists, personal letters that people sent through the ancient equivalent of the mail system, inscriptions that were put up on buildings. If we examine all of these pieces of literature from the ancient world, from the first century, from the time Jesus died in the year 30 until the year !00—if we examine all of this record from the Roman Empire, we will find that Jesus is never, ever mentioned at all. His name never occurs in any Roman source that’s neither Jewish nor Christian, from the first century of the Common Era. What were his enemies saying about him? We have no idea, because they left us no writings. Why didn’t they talk about Jesus? Well, that’s an interesting question. I would assume that they didn’t talk about Jesus because he didn’t make as big of an impact on his world as he has made on ours. The first time Jesus is ever mentioned by any pagan source Is not until the year 112 of the Common Era. The source is a letter written by a Roman governor whose name was Pliny, Pliny the Younger, as he is called. Pliny the Younger was the governor of a province in the Roman Empire, who had 4|

• From The Case for God (2009)

  74 These philosophers did not believe that they could solve these problems: indeed, their emphasis on God’s absolute power militated against it. 75 But, unwittingly, they had prepared the ground for the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when pioneering geniuses would investigate the mathematical implications of many of the questions raised in the late scholastic period secundum imaginationem. 76 The abstruse speculations of philosophers like Scotus and Ockham led to a rift between theology and spirituality that persists to the present day. 77 During the thirteenth century, some people found the new scholastic theology so dry and off-putting that they began to think that they could reach God only by discarding the intellect altogether. Instead of seeing love and knowledge as complementary, or even fused, in the traditional way, people began to see them as mutually exclusive. Until the fourteenth century, most of the great mystics were also important theologians. The theology of the Cappadocians, Denys, Augustine, Thomas, and Bonaventure was inseparable from their spiritual contemplation (theoria ) of the divine. But none of the great mystics of the late medieval and early modern periods— Johannes Tauler (1300–61), Henry Suso (c. 1295–1366), Jan van Ruysbroek (1293–1381), Richard Rolle (c. 1290–1348), Julian of Norwich (1343—c. 1416), Margery Kempe (b. 1364), Jean de Gerson (1363— 1429), Catherine of Siena (1347–80), Teresa of Avila (1515–82) and John of the Cross (1542–91)—made any significant contribution to theology. 78 During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in a complete reversal of former practice, we find people cultivating a privatized type of prayer that was devoted almost exclusively to the achievement of intense emotional states, which they imagined were an “experience” of God. The new spirituality was sometimes aggressively solitary instead of communal, and showed little or no concern for other people. 79 For the English hermit and poet Richard Rolle prayer was sensation. “I cannot tell you how surprised I was, the first time I felt my heart begin to warm,” he declared disarmingly at the beginning of The Fire of Love: It was real warmth too, not imaginary, and it felt as if it were actually on fire. I was astonished at the way the heat surged up, and how this new sensation brought great and unexpected comfort. I had to keep feeling my breast to make sure there was no physical reason for it. But once I realised that it came entirely from within, that this fire had no cause, material or sinful but was the gift of my Maker, I was absolutely delighted, and wanted my love to be even greater. 80 This was a spirituality of “urgent longing,” “interior sweetness” that set the heart “aglow,” “infusion of comfort,” and “perfervid love.” 81 Rolle heard heavenly music, inaudible to the outward ear, which released a flood of pleasurable feeling that he identified with the love of God.

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

  show. At least, that’s how I saw it. Johnson, as usual, wasn’t happy. Ever the perfectionist. “The irregularities of this whole situation,” he said, left him dumbfounded. That was his phrase, the irregularities of this whole situation. I begged him to take his dumbfoundedness and irregularity elsewhere, leave well enough alone. But he just couldn’t. He walked over and button-holed one of his biggest accounts and demanded to know what was going on. “Whaddya mean?” the man said. “I mean,” Johnson said, “we show up with this new Nike, and it’s totally untested, and frankly it’s not even all that good—and you guys are buying it. What gives?” The man laughed. “We’ve been doing business with you Blue Ribbon guys for years,” he said, “and we know that you guys tell the truth. Everyone else bullshits, you guys always shoot straight. So if you say this new shoe, this Nike, is worth a shot, we believe.” Johnson came back to the booth, scratching his head. “Telling the truth,” he said. “Who knew?” Woodell laughed. Johnson laughed. I laughed and tried not to think about my many half truths and untruths with Onitsuka. GOOD NEWS TRAVELS fast. Bad news travels faster than Grelle and Prefontaine. On a rocket. Two weeks after Chicago, Kitami walked into my office. No advance notice. No heads-up. And he cut right to the car chase. “What is this, this... thing,” he demanded, “this... NEE-kay?” I made my face blank. “Nike? Oh. It’s nothing. It’s a sideline we’ve developed, to hedge our bets, in case Onitsuka does as threatened and yanks the rug out from under us.” The answer disarmed him. As it should have. I’d rehearsed it for weeks. It was so reasonable and logical that Kitami didn’t know how to respond. He’d come spoiling for a fight, and I’d countered his bull rush with a rope-a-dope. He demanded to know who made the new shoes. I told him they were made by different factories in Japan. He demanded to know how many Nikes we’d ordered. A few thousand, I said. He gave an “Ooh.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. I didn’t mention that two members of my scrappy hometown Portland Trail Blazers had just worn Nikes during a rout of the New York Knicks, 133–86. The Oregonian had recently run a photo of Geoff Petrie driving past a Knick (Phil Jackson, by name), and visible on Petrie’s shoes was a swoosh. (We’d just made a deal with a couple of other Blazers to supply them with shoes, too.) Good thing the Oregonian didn’t have a wide circulation in Kobe. Kitami asked if the new Nike was in stores. Of course not, I lied. Or fibbed. He asked when I was going to sign his papers and sell him my company. I told him my partner still hadn’t decided. End of meeting. He buttoned and unbuttoned the coat of his suit and said he had other business in California. But he’d be back.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I wait for the thud, but it never comes because my brain loses its footing and the room tips and turns. “What do you mean?” “On the morning after we opened the door, I found a note in the shed with sleeping pills and a syringe. It said that I could leave. All I had to do was put you to sleep, inject myself, and I would wake up at home. The stipulations were that I could never talk about you. Not to police, not to anyone. I had to tell them that I had an emotional breakdown and ran away. If I told anyone about you, she said she would kill you. If I left you there, I could go home. I threw them over the side of the cliff.” “Oh my God.” I stand but my legs can’t hold me. I sit again, burying my face in my hands. Saphira, what have you done? When I look up, my soul is in my face, twisting my features. It’s angry and sad. “Isaac. Why would you do that?” My voice cracks. I know why Saphira did it. She knew he wouldn’t leave me. She knew eventually he would tell me, and that in telling me, I would see everything clearly. I would see… “Because I love you.” My face goes slack. “I didn’t leave you because I couldn’t. I’ve never been able to.” There is a pause and then, “Not unless you make me go. And if I’d known you better back then, I wouldn’t have left you. I thought it was what you needed. But you didn’t know yourself. I knew you. You needed me, and I let you push me out. And for that I’m very sorry.” He presses his lips together, and the vein in his head pops. “I got another chance, too,” he says. “She gave me another chance not to leave. So I took it.” “Are you saying Saphira—” “I’m not saying anything about Saphira,” he cuts me off. “She did what she did. We can’t change that. Life happens. Sometimes crazy people kidnap you and make you a part of their personal psychological experiment.” The noise that comes from my throat is part laugh, part groan. “She wanted to see what love would do if put to the test.” Love doesn’t leave. It bears all things. I don’t know why Saphira wanted to test love. If it was to show me something, or to show herself. I wonder about that. Who she was. Who the man who built the house was to her. But she played with our lives, and I hate her for that. Isaac missed his daughter’s birth, months of her life because of what Saphira did.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He had both arms around paper bags loaded to the brim with groceries. He brought me groceries. “Why are you here?” “Because you are.” He stepped passed me and walked to the kitchen without my permission. I stood frozen for several minutes, looking at his car. It was drizzling outside, the sky covered in a thick fog that hung over the trees likes a burial shroud. When I finally closed the door, I was shivering. “Doctor Asterholder,” I said, walking into the kitchen. My kitchen. He was unpacking things on my counter: cans of tomato paste, boxes of rigatoni, bright yellow bananas and clear cartons of berries. “Isaac,” he corrected me. “Doctor Asterholder. I appreciate … I … but—” “Did you eat today?” He fished his soggy business card out of the sink and held it between two fingers. Not knowing what else to do, I wandered over to my barstool and took a seat. I wasn’t used to this sort of aggression. People gave me space, left me alone. Even if I asked them not to—which was rare. I didn’t want to be anyone’s project and I definitely didn’t want this man’s pity. But for the moment I had no words. I watched him open bottles and chop things. He took out his phone and set it on the counter and asked me if I minded. When I shook my head, he put it on. Her voice was raspy. It had both an old and new feel to it, innovative, classic. I asked him who she was and he told me, “Julia Stone.” It was a literary name. I liked it. He played her entire album, tossing things into a pot he found by himself. The house was dark aside from the kitchen light he stood underneath. It felt quaint, like a life that didn’t belong to me, but I enjoyed watching. When was the last time I had someone over? Not since I bought the house. That was three years ago. There was a long window above my sink that stretched the length of the room. My appliances were all on the same wall, so no matter what you were doing you had a panoramic view of the lake. Sometimes when I was washing dishes I’d get so caught up looking outside, my hand would still and the water would turn cold before I realized that I’d been staring for fifteen minutes. I saw him peering into the darkness as he stood at the stove. The lights from the houses floated like fireflies in ink behind him. I let my eyes leave him and I watched the darkness instead. The darkness comforted me. “Senna?” I jumped. Isaac was next to me. He put a placemat and utensils in front of me, along with a bowl of steaming food, and a glass of something bubbly.

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

  We were getting carried away, to be sure, but our sense of history, and martial triumph, was underscored by the date. It was July 4. A clerk led us into a conference room crammed full of attorneys. Our mood abruptly changed. Mine did, anyway. At the center of the room was Kitami. A surprise. I don’t know why I was surprised to see him. He needed to sign the papers, cut the check. He reached out his hand. A bigger surprise. I shook it. We all took seats around the table. Before each of us stood a stack of twenty documents, and each document had dozens of dotted lines. We signed until our fingers tingled. It took at least an hour. The mood was tense, the silence profound, except for one moment. I recall that Strasser let forth with a huge sneeze. Like an elephant. And I also recall that he was begrudgingly wearing a brand-new navy-blue suit, which he’d had tailored by his mother-in-law, who put all the extra material

• From The Case for God (2009)

  When we have eaten a strong-tasting dish in a restaurant, we are often offered a sorbet to cleanse our palate so that we can taste the next course properly. An intelligent atheistic critique could help us to rinse our minds of the more facile theology that is impeding our understanding of the divine. We may find that for a while we have to go into what mystics called the dark night of the soul or the cloud of unknowing. This will not be easy for people used to getting instant information at the click of a mouse. But the novelty and strangeness of this negative capability could surprise us into awareness that stringent ratiocination is not the only means of acquiring knowledge. It is not only a poet like Keats who must, while waiting for new inspiration, learn to be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” But is there no way of grounding commitment to the unknown and indefinable God? Are we doomed to the perpetual regression of postmodern thought? Perhaps the only viable “natural theology” lies in religious experience. By this, of course, I do not mean fervid emotional piety. We have seen that in the past scholars and spiritual directors had little time for this religious positivism. Instead of seeking out exotic raptures, Schleiermacher, Bultmann, Rahner, and Lonergan have all suggested that we should explore the normal workings of our minds and notice how frequently these propel us quite naturally into transcendence. Instead of looking for what we call God “outside ourselves” ( foris ) in the cosmos, we should, like Augustine, turn within and become aware of the way quite ordinary responses segue into “otherness.” We have seen how the inherent finitude of language was regularly exploited by teachers like Denys to make the faithful aware of the silence we encounter on the other side of speech. It has been well said that music, which, as we saw at the beginning of this book, is a “definitively” rational activity, is itself a “natural theology.” 7 In music the mind experiences a pure, direct emotion that transcends ego and fuses subjectivity and objectivity. As Basil explained, we can never know the ineffable ousia of God but can glimpse only its traces or effects (energeiai ) in our time-bound, sense-bound world. It is clear that the meditation, yoga, and rituals that work aesthetically on a congregation have, when practiced assiduously over a lifetime, a marked effect on the personality—an effect that is another form of natural theology. There is no dramatic “born-again” conversion but a slow, incremental, and imperceptible transformation. Above all, the habitual practice of compassion and the Golden Rule “all day and every day” demands perpetual kenosis .

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

  This appearance implied the resurrection and the ascension, and this was the irresistible evidence of His Messiahship, God’s own seal of approval upon the work of Jesus. And the resurrection again shed a new light upon His death on the cross, disclosing it as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world, as the means of procuring pardon and peace consistent with the claims of divine justice. What a revelation! That same Jesus of Nazareth whom he hated and persecuted as a false prophet justly crucified between two robbers, stood before Saul as the risen, ascended, and glorified Messiah! And instead of crushing the persecutor as he deserved, He pardoned him and called him to be His witness before Jews and Gentiles! This revelation was enough for an orthodox Jew waiting for the hope of Israel to make him a Christian, and enough for a Jew of such force of character to make him an earnest and determined Christian. The logic of his intellect and the energy of his will required that he should love and promote the new faith with the same enthusiasm with which he had hated and persecuted it; for hatred is but inverted love, and the intensity of love and hatred depends on the strength of affection and the ardor of temper.

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

  Rudy handed me a pair of soles that looked as if they’d been teleported from the twenty-second century. Big, clunky, they were clear thick plastic and inside were—bubbles? I turned them over. “Bubbles?” I said. “Pressurized air bags,” he said. I set down the soles and gave Rudy a closer look, a full head-to-toe. Six-three, lanky, with unruly dark hair, bottle-bottom glasses, a lopsided grin, and a severe vitamin D deficiency, I thought. Not enough sunshine. Or else a long-lost member of the Addams Family. He saw me appraising him, saw my skepticism, and wasn’t the least fazed. He walked to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and began writing numbers, symbols, equations. He explained at some length why an air shoe would work, why it would never go flat, why it was the Next Big Thing. When he finished I stared at the blackboard. As a trained accountant I’d spent a good part of my life looking at blackboards, but this Rudy fella’s scribbles were something else. Indecipherable. Humans have been wearing shoes since the Ice Age, I said, and the underlying design hasn’t changed all that much in forty thousand years. There hadn’t really been a breakthrough since the late 1800s, when cobblers started lasting left and right shoes differently, and rubber companies started making soles. It didn’t seem all too likely that, at this late date in history, something so new, so revolutionary, was going to be dreamed up. “Air shoes” sounded to me like jet packs and moving sidewalks. Comic book stuff. Rudy still wasn’t discouraged. He kept at it, unflappable, earnest. Finally he shrugged and said that he understood. He’d tried to pitch Adidas and they’d been skeptical, too. Abracadabra. That was all I needed to hear. I asked if I could fit his air soles into my running shoes and give them a try. “They don’t have a moderator,” he said. “They’d be loose and wobbly.” “I don’t care about that,” I said. I squeezed the soles into my shoes, slipped the shoes back on, laced them up. Not bad, I said, bouncing up and down. I went for a six-mile run. They were indeed unstable. But they were also one heck of a ride. I ran back to the office. Still covered with sweat, I ran straight up to Strasser and told him: “I think we might have something here.” THAT NIGHT STRASSER and I went to dinner with Rudy and Bogert. Rudy explained more of the science behind the air soles, and this second time around it started to make sense. I told him there was a possibility we could do business. Then I turned it over to Strasser to close.

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

  Hours later, going through customs in Beijing, I heard behind me a great commotion. The room was bare, with plywood partitions, and on the other side of one partition several Chinese officers were shouting. I went around the partition and found two officers, agitated, pointing at Hayes and his open suitcase. I walked over. Strasser and Chang walked over. Lying atop Hayes’s giant underwear were twelve quarts of vodka.

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

  At Station 7 I stopped and bought a Japanese beer and a cup of noodles. While eating my dinner I fell to talking with another couple. They were Americans, younger than me—students, I assumed. He was preppy, in a ridiculous sort of way. Golf slacks and tennis shirt and cloth belt—he was all the colors of an Easter egg. She was pure beatnik. Torn jeans, faded T-shirt, wild dark hair. Her wide-set eyes were brown-black. Like little cups of espresso. Both were sweating from the climb. They mentioned that I wasn’t. I shrugged and said that I’d run track at Oregon. “Half-miler.” The young man scowled. His girlfriend said, “Wow.” We finished our beers and resumed climbing together. Her name was Sarah. She was from Maryland. Horse country, she said. Rich country, I thought. She’d grown up riding, and jumping, and showing, and still spent much of her time in saddles and show rings. She talked about her favorite ponies and horses as if they were her closest friends. I asked about her family. “Daddy owns a candy bar company,” she said. She mentioned the company and I laughed. I’d eaten many of her family’s candy bars, sometimes before a race. The company was founded by her grandfather, she said, though she hastened to add that she had no interest in money. I caught her boyfriend scowling again. She was studying philosophy at Connecticut College for Women. “Not a great school,” she said apologetically. She’d wanted to go to Smith, where her sister was a senior, but she didn’t get in. “You sound as if you haven’t gotten over the rejection,” I said. “Not even close,” she said. “Rejection is never easy,” I said. “You can say that again.” Her voice was peculiar. She pronounced certain words oddly, and I couldn’t decide if it was a Maryland accent or a speech impediment. Whichever, it was adorable. She asked what brought me to Japan. I explained that I’d come to save my shoe company. “Your company?” she said. Clearly she was thinking about the men in her family, founders of companies, captains of industry. Entrepreneurs. “Yes,” I said, “my company.” “And did you… save it?” she asked. “I did,” I said. “All the boys back home are going to business school,” she said, “and then they all plan to become bankers.” She rolled her eyes, adding: “Everyone does the same thing—so boring.” “Boredom scares me,” I said. “Ah. That’s because you’re a rebel.” I stopped climbing, stabbed my walking stick into the ground. Me—a rebel? My face grew warm.