Yearning

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Case for God (2009)

  A felt desire for God can be only an ego need, born of the images we use to fill our emptiness. Any “God” we find in this way is an idol that would actually alienate us from ourselves: For if you love God as he is God, as he is spirit, as he is person, and as he is image—all this must go! Then how should I love him? You should love him as he is nonGod, a nonspirit, a nonperson, a nonimage, but as he is—pure, unmixed, bright “One” separated from all duality; and in that One we should sink eternally down, out of “something” into “nothing.” 93 Eckhart’s exuberant language, which swings so enthusiastically from the affirmative to the apophatic, demonstrates that precisely because this transformation is not an emotional “experience,” it cannot be described in words. Despite the new scholasticism, Denys’s dialectical method was still ingrained in European theology. We see it in two very different English writers of the fourteenth century. Julian of Norwich, who was not a trained theologian, has a perfect grasp of the apophatic, even at her most affirmative. When she speaks of Christ, for example, she alternates between male and female imagery to push the reader beyond these mundane categories. “In our Mother, Christ, we grow and develop; in his mercy he reforms and restores us; through his passion, death and resurrection he has united us to our being. So does our Mother work in mercy for all his children who respond to him and obey him.” 94 And even though the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing , who translated Denys’ Mystical Theology into English, is taking the apophatic tradition in a new, fourteenth-century direction, he still sees it as fundamental to the religious life. 95 If we want to know God, all thoughts about the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, the life of Christ, and the stories of the saints—which are perfectly good in themselves—must be cast under a thick “cloud of forgetting.” 96 At first, the author explains, a beginner would encounter only darkness “and, as it were, a cloud of unknowing.” 97 If he asked: “How am I to think of God himself and what is he?” our author replied: “I cannot answer you, except to say ‘I do not know!’ For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the same cloud of unknowing where I want you to be!” 98 We can think about all kinds of things, but “of God himself can no man think.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She nodded, not much impressed: she had heard all this before, in letters. ‘Just make sure it’s not so long before you come home again. It is very nice to get your parcels; it was very nice to get those gifts; but we would rather have you, than a hairbrush or a pair of boots.’ I looked away, abashed; I still felt foolish when I thought about the presents. Even so, I didn’t think she needed to be quite so rusty about it, quite so hard. Having made the decision to leave sooner, I grew impatient. I packed my bags that night, and rose, next morning, even earlier than Alice. At seven, when the breakfast things were cleared away, I was ready to go. I embraced them all, but my parting was not so sad, nor so sweet, as it had been the first time I had left them; and I had no premonition of anything to come, to make it sadder. Davy was kind, and made me promise I would come home for his wedding, and said I might bring Kitty if I liked, which made me love him all the more. Mother smiled, but her smile was tight; Alice was so chill that, in the end, I turned my back on her. Only Father hugged me to him as if really loath to get me go; and when he said that he would miss me, I knew he meant it. No one could be spared, this time, to walk me to the station, so I made my own way there. I didn’t look at Whitstable, or the sea, as my train pulled away from it; I certainly did not think, I shan’t see you again, for years and years - and if I had, I am ashamed to say it would not much have troubled me. I thought only of Kitty. It was still only half-past seven; she wouldn’t rise, I knew, till ten, and I planned to surprise her - to let myself into our rooms at Stamford Hill, and creep into her bed. The train rolled on, through Faversham and Rochester. I was not impatient now. I did not need to be impatient. I merely sat and thought of her warm, slumbering body that I would soon embrace; I imagined her pleasure, her surprise, her rising love, at seeing me returned so soon. Our house, when I gazed up at it from the street, was, as I had hoped, quite dark and shuttered. I walked on tip-toe up the steps, and eased my key into the lock. The passageway was quiet: even our landlady and her husband seemed still abed. I laid down my bags, and took off my coat. There was a cloak already hanging from the hat-stand, and I squinted at it: it was Walter’s.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said softly. ‘Imagine if the whole river froze over, if it was frozen right down from here to Richmond. Would you walk across it?’ Kitty shivered, and shook her head. ‘The ice would break,’ she said. ‘We would sink and drown; or else be stranded and die of the cold!’ I had expected her to smile, not make me a serious answer. I saw us floating down the Thames, out to sea - past Whitstable, perhaps - on a piece of ice no bigger than a pancake. The horse took a step, and its bridle jangled; the driver gave a cough. Still we gazed at the river, silent and unmoving - and both of us, finally, rather grave. At last Kitty gave a whisper. ‘Ain’t it queer,’ she said. I made no answer, only stared at where the curdled water swirled, thick and unwilling, about the columns of the bridge beneath our feet. But when she shivered again I moved a step closer to her, and felt her lean against me in response. It was icy cold upon the bridge; we should have moved back from the parapet into the shelter of the carriage. But we were loath to leave the sight of the frozen river - loath too, perhaps, to leave the warmth of one another’s bodies, now that we had found it. I took her hand. Her fingers, I could feel, were stiff and cold inside her glove. I placed the hand against my cheek; it did not warm it. With my eyes all the time on the water below I pulled at the button at her wrist, then drew the mitten from her, and held her fingers against my lips to warm them with my breath. I sighed, gently, against her knuckles; then turned the hand, and breathed upon her palm. There was no sound at all save the unfamiliar lapping and creaking of the frozen river. Then, ‘Nan,’ she said, very low. I looked at her, her hand still held to my mouth and my breath still damp upon her fingers. Her face was raised to mine, and her gaze was dark and strange and thick, like the water below. I let my hand drop; she kept her fingers upon my lips, then moved them, very slowly, to my cheek, my ear, my throat, my neck. Then her features gave a shiver and she said in a whisper : ‘You won’t tell a soul, Nan - will you?’ I think I sighed then: sighed to know - to know for sure, at last! - that there was something to be told.

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

  So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid? Worse, like the same shy, pale, rail-thin kid I’d always been. Maybe because I still hadn’t experienced anything of life. Least of all its many temptations and excitements. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette, hadn’t tried a drug. I hadn’t broken a rule, let alone a law. The 1960s were just under way, the age of rebellion, and I was the only person in America who hadn’t yet rebelled. I couldn’t think of one time I’d cut loose, done the unexpected. I’d never even been with a girl. If I tended to dwell on all the things I wasn’t, the reason was simple. Those were the things I knew best. I’d have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. Like all my friends I wanted to be successful. Unlike my friends I didn’t know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Wife? Kids? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them, instinctively. But deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all... different. I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win. No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose. And then it happened. As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me, exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play. Yes, I thought, that’s it. That’s the word. The secret of happiness, I’d always suspected, the essence of beauty or truth, or all we ever need to know of either, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life. At different times I’d fantasized about becoming a great novelist, a great journalist, a great statesman. But the ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. Sadly, fate had made me good, not great. At twenty-four I was finally resigned to that fact. I’d run track at Oregon, and I’d distinguished myself, lettering three of four years. But that was that, the end. Now, as I began to clip off one brisk six-minute mile after another, as the rising sun set fire to the lowest needles of the pines, I asked myself: What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel?

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In his later work, Derrida seemed haunted by the potential and lure of an open future. He affirmed what he calls the “undeconstructible,” which is not another absolute, because it does not exist, and yet we weep and pray for it. As he explained in his lecture “The Force of Law” (1989), justice is an undeconstructible “something” that is never fully realized in the actual circumstances of daily life but that informs all legal speculation. Justice is not what exists; it is what we desire. It calls us; it seems sometimes within our grasp but ultimately eludes us. And yet we go on trying to incarnate it in our legal systems. Derrida later went on to discuss other “undeconstuctibles”: gift, forgiveness, and friendship. He loved to talk of the “democracy to come”: we yearn for democracy but we never fully achieve it; it remains an incessant hope for the future. And in the same way, “God,” a term often used in the past to set a limit to human thought and endeavor, becomes for the postmodern philosopher the desire beyond desire, a memory and a promise that is, by its very nature, indefinable. Some postmodern thinkers have applied these ideas to theology. Significantly, they are usually philosophers rather than theologians. Reversing the trend begun by such philosophes as Diderot, d’Holbach, and Freud, their interest heralds a change in the intellectual atmosphere of academe. At the time of the Death of God movement in the 1960s, God’s days seemed numbered, but now God seems alive and well. Postmodern theology challenges the assumption that secularism is irreversible; some have suggested that we are now entering a “postsecular” age but have also made it clear that the religion being revitalized must be different from “modern” faith. The first to apply Derrida’s ideas to theology was Mark C. Taylor in Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (1984); the slash in the subtitle was designed to mark a Derridian hesitation before settling for either God or Godlessness. Taylor saw a link between deconstruction and the 1960s Death of God movement, but criticized Altizer for being stuck in the modern dialectic in which things were either dead or alive, absent or present. In his view, religion was present even when it seemed absent—so much so that he was criticized for allowing religion in his later work to be entirely swallowed up in other discourses.

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

  I’d also toyed with the notion of making an exotic detour on my way to and from Japan. How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it? Before running a big race, you always want to walk the track. A backpacking trip around the globe might be just the thing, I reasoned. No one talked about bucket lists in those days, but I suppose that’s close to what I had in mind. Before I died, became too old or consumed with everyday minutiae, I wanted to visit the planet’s most beautiful and wondrous places. And its most sacred. Of course I wanted to taste other foods, hear other languages, dive into other cultures, but what I really craved was connection with a capital C. I wanted to experience what the Chinese call Tao, the Greeks call Logos, the Hindus call Jñāna, the Buddhists call Dharma. What the Christians call Spirit. Before setting out on my own personal life voyage, I thought, let me first understand the greater voyage of humankind. Let me explore the grandest temples and churches and shrines, the holiest rivers and mountaintops. Let me feel the presence of… God? Yes, I told myself, yes. For want of a better word, God. But first, I’d need my father’s approval. More, I’d need his cash. I’d already mentioned making a big trip, the previous year, and my father seemed open to it. But surely he’d forgotten. And surely I was pushing it, adding to the original proposal this Crazy Idea, this outrageous side trip—to Japan? To launch a company? Talk about boondoggles. Surely he’d see this as a bridge too far. And a bridge too darned expensive. I had some savings from the Army, and from various part-time jobs over the last several summers. On top of which, I planned to sell my car, a cherry black 1960 MG with racing tires and a twin cam. (The same car Elvis drove in Blue Hawaii.) All of which amounted to fifteen hundred dollars, leaving me a grand short, I now told my father. He nodded, uh-huh, mm-hmm, and flicked his eyes from the TV to me, and back again, while I laid it all out. Remember how we talked, Dad? How I said I want to see the World? The Himalayas? The pyramids? The Dead Sea, Dad? The Dead Sea? Well, haha, I’m also thinking of stopping off in Japan, Dad. Remember my Crazy Idea? Japanese running shoes? Right? It could be huge, Dad. Huge.

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

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

• From Educated (2018)

  The number of my sister wives would depend on my husband’s righteousness: the more nobly he lived, the more wives he would be given. I had never made my peace with it. As a girl I had often imagined myself in heaven, dressed in a white gown, standing in a pearly mist across from my husband. But when the camera zoomed out there were ten women standing behind us, wearing the same white dress. In my fantasy I was the first wife but I knew there was no guarantee of that; I might be hidden anywhere in the long chain of wives. For as long as I could remember, this image had been at the core of my idea of paradise: my husband, and his wives. There was a sting in this arithmetic: in knowing that in the divine calculus of heaven, one man could balance the equation for countless women. I remembered my great-great-grandmother. I had first heard her name when I was twelve, which is the year that, in Mormonism, you cease to be a child and become a woman. Twelve was the age when lessons in Sunday school began to include words like purity and chastity. It was also the age that I was asked, as part of a church assignment, to learn about one of my ancestors. I asked Mother which ancestor I should choose, and without thinking she said, “Anna Mathea.” I said the name aloud. It floated off my tongue like the beginning of a fairy tale. Mother said I should honor Anna Mathea because she had given me a gift: her voice. “It was her voice that brought our family to the church,” Mother said. “She heard Mormon missionaries preaching in the streets of Norway. She prayed, and God blessed her with faith, with the knowledge that Joseph Smith was His prophet. She told her father, but he’d heard stories about the Mormons and wouldn’t allow her to be baptized. So she sang for him. She sang him a Mormon hymn called ‘O My Father.’ When she finished singing, her father had tears in his eyes. He said that any religion with music so beautiful must be the work of God. They were baptized together.” After Anna Mathea converted her parents, the family felt called by God to come to America and meet the prophet Joseph. They saved for the journey, but after two years they could bring only half the family. Anna Mathea was left behind. The journey was long and harsh, and by the time they made it to Idaho, to a Mormon settlement called Worm Creek, Anna’s mother was sick, dying. It was her last wish to see her daughter again, so her father wrote to Anna, begging her to take what money she had and come to America. Anna had fallen in love and was to be married, but she left her fiancé in Norway and crossed the ocean. Her mother died before she reached the American shore.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  All the regular Christian practices—theology, liturgy, exegesis, morality, and acts of kindness—were supposed to be informed by the silent, reticent attitude of hesychia . It was not just for solitaries but could also be experienced in public worship and human relationships. 28 One of the most famous exponents of the new apophatic theology was a married man who had been a professional orator until he became bishop of the small Cappadocian town of Nyssa. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 331–95) had become involved in the political turmoil of the Arian controversy with great reluctance. He was uneasy about these theological disputes, because it was impossible to adjudicate Christian teaching from a position of magisterial detachment. Theology depended on practice, and its truth could be assessed only by people who allowed its doctrines to change them. We could not speak about God rationally, as we speak about ordinary beings, but that did not mean that we should give up thinking about God at all. 29 We had to press on, pushing our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing and acknowledging that there could be no final clarity. After an initial frustration, the soul would realize that “the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on with her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfillment of her desire continually generates further desire for the Transcendent.” 30 You had to leave behind “all that can be grasped by sense or reason” so that “the only thing left for contemplation is the invisible and the incomprehensible.” 31 Gregory could see this process at work in the life of Moses. His first encounter with God had been the revelation of the Burning Bush, where he had learned that the God that called itself “I Am” was being itself. Everything else in the universe “that the senses perceive or intelligence contemplates” could only participate in the being that sustained it at every second. 32 After this initial revelation, Moses, like the great philosophers, had engaged in a disciplined contemplation of the natural world. But while nature could lead us to the Logos, through whom the world was made, it could not bring us to God itself. When Moses climbed Mount Sinai and entered the impenetrable darkness on its summit, however, he was in the place where God was—even though he could not see anything. He had at last left normal modes of perception behind and achieved an entirely different kind of seeing. Pushing his reason to the point where it could go no further, he had intuited the silent otherness that existed beyond the reach of words and concepts. Once the hesychast understood this, he realized that any attempt to define God clearly “becomes an idol of God and does not make him known.”

• From Educated (2018)

  I found the science book, with its colorful illustrations, and the math book I remembered from years before. I even located a faded green book of history. But when I sat down to study I nearly always fell asleep. The pages were glossy and soft, made softer by the hours I’d spent hauling scrap. When Dad saw me with one of those books, he’d try to get me away from them. Perhaps he was remembering Tyler. Perhaps he thought if he could just distract me for a few years, the danger would pass. So he made up jobs for me to do, whether they needed doing or not. One afternoon, after he’d caught me looking at the math book, he and I spent an hour hauling buckets of water across the field to his fruit trees, which wouldn’t have been at all unusual except it was during a rainstorm. But if Dad was trying to keep his children from being overly interested in school and books—from being seduced by the Illuminati, like Tyler had been—he would have done better to turn his attention to Richard. Richard was also supposed to spend his afternoons making tinctures for Mother, but he almost never did. Instead, he’d disappear. I don’t know if Mother knew where he went, but I did. In the afternoons, Richard could nearly always be found in the dark basement, wedged in the crawl space between the couch and the wall, an encyclopedia propped open in front of him. If Dad happened by he’d turn the light off, muttering about wasted electricity. Then I’d find some excuse to go downstairs so I could turn it back on. If Dad came through again, a snarl would sound through the house, and Mother would have to sit through a lecture on leaving lights on in empty rooms. She never scolded me, which makes me wonder if she did know where Richard was. If I couldn’t get back down to turn on the light, Richard would pull the book to his nose and read in the dark; he wanted to read that badly. He wanted to read the encyclopedia that badly. —TYLER WAS GONE. There was hardly a trace he’d ever lived in the house, except one: every night, after dinner, I would close the door to my room and pull Tyler’s old boom box from under my bed. I’d dragged his desk into my room, and while the choir sang I would settle into his chair and study, just as I’d seen him do on a thousand nights. I didn’t study history or math. I studied religion. I read the Book of Mormon twice. I read the New Testament, once quickly, then a second time more slowly, pausing to make notes, to cross-reference, and even to write short essays on doctrines like faith and sacrifice. No one read the essays; I wrote them for myself, the way I imagined Tyler had studied for himself and himself only.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Unlike the phusikoi , Socrates was primarily interested in goodness, which, like Confucius, he refused to define. Instead of analyzing the concept of virtue, he wanted to live a virtuous life. When asked for a definition of justice, for example, Socrates replied: “Instead of speaking it, I make it understood in my acts.” 32 It was only when a person chose to behave justly that he could form any idea of a wholly just existence. For Socrates and those who came after him, a philosopher was essentially a “lover of wisdom.” He yearned for wisdom precisely because he realized that he lacked it. As Paul Friedlander has explained, there was “a tension between ignorance —that is, the impossibility ultimately to put into words ‘what justice is’—and the direct experience of the unknown, the existence of the just man, whom justice raises to the level of the divine.” 33 As far as we can tell from Plato’s dialogues, Socrates seems to have been reaching toward a transcendent notion of absolute virtue that could never be adequately conceived or expressed but could be intuited by such spiritual disciplines as meditation. Socrates was famous for his formidable powers of concentration. “Every now and then he just goes off,” a friend remarked, “and stands motionless, wherever he happens to be.” 34 Alcibiades, the famous Athenian politician, recalled that during a military campaign, Socrates had started thinking about a problem, could not resolve it, and to the astonishment of his fellow soldiers “stood there, glued to the spot,” all day and all night, leaving his station only at dawn, “when the sun came out and he made his prayers to the new day.” 35 Plato’s dialogues were a model for the type of meditation that Socrates and his followers practiced; it was nothing like yoga but took the form of a conversation with oneself—conducted either in solitude or together with others—that pushed thought to the very limit. But this type of internal dialogue was possible only if the self that you were conversing with was authentic. Socrates’ mission was to awaken genuine self-knowledge in the people who came to talk to him. He had invented what is known as dialectic, a rigorous discipline designed to expose false beliefs and elicit truth. Consequently a conversation with Socrates could be disturbing. Even if somebody started to talk to him about something quite different, his friend Niceas explained, he would finally be forced to “submit to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto.

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

  As a freshman, as a sophomore, as a junior, I lost count of how many races I ran in flats or spikes modified by Bowerman. By my senior year he was making all my shoes from scratch. Naturally I believed this new Tiger, this funny little shoe from Japan that had taken more than a full year to reach me, would intrigue my old coach. Of course, it wasn’t as light as his cod shoes. But it had potential: the Japanese were promising to improve it. Better yet, it was inexpensive. I knew this would appeal to Bowerman’s innate frugality. Even the shoe’s name struck me as something Bowerman might flip for. He usually called his runners “Men of Oregon,” but every once in a while he’d exhort us to be “tigers.” I can see him pacing the locker room, telling us before a race, “Be TIGERS out there!” (If you weren’t a tiger, he’d often call you a “hamburger.”) Now and then, when we bellyached about our skimpy prerace meal, he’d growl: “A tiger hunts best when he’s hungry.” With any luck, I thought, Coach will order a few pairs of Tigers for his tigers. But whether or not he placed an order, impressing Bowerman would be enough. That alone would constitute success for my fledgling company. It’s possible that everything I did in those days was motivated by some deep yearning to impress, to please, Bowerman. Besides my father there was no man whose approval I craved more, and besides my father there was no man who gave it less often. Frugality carried over to every part of the coach’s makeup. He weighed and hoarded words of praise, like uncut diamonds. After you’d won a race, if you were lucky, Bowerman might say: “Nice race.” (In fact, that’s precisely what he said to one of his milers after the young man became one of the very first to crack the mythical four-minute mark in the United States.) More likely Bowerman would say nothing. He’d stand before you in his tweed blazer and ratty sweater vest, his string tie blowing in the wind, his battered ball cap pulled low, and nod once. Maybe stare. Those ice-blue eyes, which missed nothing, gave nothing. Everyone talked about Bowerman’s dashing good looks, his retro crew cut, his ramrod posture and planed jawline, but what always got me was that gaze of pure violet blue.

• From Educated (2018)

  After five minutes online and a few trips to the stacks, I was sitting in my usual place with a large pile of books written by what I now understood to be second-wave writers—Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir. I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut. I’d never seen the word “vagina” printed out, never said it aloud. I returned to the Internet and then to the shelves, where I exchanged the books of the second wave for those that preceded the first—Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. I read through the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt since childhood. From the moment I had first understood that my brother Richard was a boy and I was a girl, I had wanted to exchange his future for mine. My future was motherhood; his, fatherhood. They sounded similar but they were not. To be one was to be a decider. To preside. To call the family to order. To be the other was to be among those called. I knew my yearning was unnatural. This knowledge, like so much of my self-knowledge, had come to me in the voice of people I knew, people I loved. All through the years that voice had been with me, whispering, wondering, worrying. That I was not right . That my dreams were perversions. That voice had many timbres, many tones. Sometimes it was my father’s voice; more often it was my own. I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations. Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman. —IN DECEMBER, AFTER I had submitted my last essay, I took a train to London and boarded a plane. Mother, Audrey and Emily picked me up at the airport in Salt Lake City, and together we skidded onto the interstate. It was nearly midnight when the mountain came into view. I could only just make out her grand form against the inky sky. When I entered the kitchen I noticed a gaping hole in the wall, which led to a new extension Dad was building.

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

  “Oh,” she said, looking down at her feet. “Well. Okay. Okay.” She hurried onto the elevator, and as the doors closed she never lifted her gaze from her shoes. I TOOK HER to the Oregon Zoo. I don’t know why. I guess I thought walking around and gazing at animals would be a low-key way of getting to know each other. Also, Burmese pythons, Nigerian goats, African crocodiles, they would give me ample opportunities to impress her with tales of my travels. I felt the need to brag about seeing the pyramids, the Temple of Nike. I also told her about falling ill in Calcutta. I’d never described that scary moment, in detail, to anyone. I didn’t know why I was telling Miss Parks, except that Calcutta had been one of the loneliest moments of my life, and I felt very unlonely just then. I confessed that Blue Ribbon was tenuous. The whole thing might go bust any day, but I still couldn’t see myself doing anything else. My little shoe company was a living, breathing thing, I said, which I’d created from nothing. I’d breathed it into life, nurtured it through illness, brought it back several times from the dead, and now I wanted, needed, to see it stand on its own feet and go out into the world. “Does that make sense?” I said. Mm-hm, she said. We strolled past the lions and tigers. I told her that I flat-out didn’t want to work for someone else. 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.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  When you are broken, you run. But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards. My reasons weren’t White’s, but I was running just the same. It was a morning in early August, and I was four hundred miles from home. What I was doing felt like a drugs deal. It certainly looked like one. For minutes on end I’d paced up and down a Scottish quayside with a can of caffeinated soda in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and an envelope stuffed with £800 in twenty-pound notes in my back pocket. Over there in the car sat Christina, spectacularly impassive in a pair of aviator shades. She’d come along to keep me company, and I hoped she wasn’t bored. She was probably bored. Perhaps she was asleep. I walked back to the car. It was my father’s. I was driving it now, but the boot was full of things I couldn’t bring myself to remove: 35mm film canisters; a crushed packet of aspirin; a newspaper with a half-finished crossword in my father’s hand; a pair of winter gloves. I leaned against the bonnet, rubbed my eyes and looked out at the harbour, willing the ferry into view. A clear pool of turquoise was spreading out there over the Irish Sea; small crosses that were gulls traversed it. It seemed strange that it was day at all; both of us were wiped out from yesterday’s long drive, and faintly freaked out by the hotel we’d stayed at the night before. 21st Century Hotel! it said on a laminated paper sign by the door. When we opened it the first thing we saw was a plastic bulldog sitting on a desk, grimacing at us with the malevolent, merry belligerence of a thing from a nightmare. In the hotel room we found a broken computer, a sink that wasn’t plumbed in, and a fully functioning cooker we’d been instructed not to use under any circumstances. ‘Health and Safety,’ the hotelier had explained, rolling his eyes. There were, unexpectedly, two televisions, acres of brown suedette stapled to the walls, and a bathroom with a six-foot sunken bath into which Christina subsided, marvelling at the tea-tinted peat water. I collapsed into a chair, the journey running in my mind like a road-movie directed by a drug-addled auteur. Giant Irn-Bru trucks full of orange, bubblegum-flavoured fizzy Scottish soda. A raven standing in a puddle by the side of the road, wet-trousered and chisel-beaked. Motorway service station A. Motorway service station B. A sandwich. A large cup of undrinkable coffee. Endless miles. More skies. A near-accident caused by inattention on a hillside somewhere. Motorway service stations C and D. I massaged my aching right calf, blinked away the after-images, and got to making jesses.

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

  And it did start out that way. My first assignment was a Beaverton company, Reser’s Fine Foods, and as the solo man on the job I got to spend quality time with the CEO, Al Reser, who was just three years older than me. I picked up some important lessons from him, and enjoyed my time poring over his books. But I was too overworked to fully enjoy it. The trouble with a small satellite branch within a big accounting firm is the workload. Whenever extra work came rolling in, there was no one to take up the slack. During the busy season, November through April, we found ourselves up to our ears, logging twelve-hour days, six days a week, which didn’t leave much time to learn. Also, we were watched. Closely. Our minutes were counted, to the second. When President Kennedy was killed that November I asked for the day off. I wanted to sit in front of the TV with the rest of the nation and mourn. My boss, however, shook his head. Work first, mourn second. Consider the lilies of the field… they neither toil nor spin. I had two consolations. One was money. I was earning five hundred dollars a month, which enabled me to buy a new car. I couldn’t justify another MG, so I bought a Plymouth Valiant. Reliable, but with some pizzazz. And a dash of color. The salesman called it sea-foam green. My friends called it vomit green. It was actually the green of newly minted money. My other consolation was lunch. Each day at noon I’d walk down the street to the local travel agency and stand like Walter Mitty before the posters in the window. Switzerland. Tahiti. Moscow. Bali. I’d grab a brochure and leaf through it while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a bench in the park. I’d ask the pigeons: Can you believe it was only a year ago that I was surfing Waikiki? Eating water buffalo stew after an early morning hike in the Himalayas? Are the best moments of my life behind me? Was my trip around the world… my peak? The pigeons were less responsive than the statue at Wat Phra Kaew. This is how I spent 1963. Quizzing pigeons. Polishing my Valiant. Writing letters. Dear Carter, Did you ever leave Shangri-La? I’m an accountant now and giving some thought to blowing my brains out. 1964The notice arrived right around Christmas, so I must have driven down to the waterfront warehouse the first week of 1964. I don’t recall exactly. I know it was early morning. I can see myself getting there before the clerks unlocked the doors. I handed them the notice and they went into the back and returned with a large box covered in Japanese writing.

• From City of Night (1963)

  From El Paso, I had gone to Evanston outside Chicago—a serene green campus city—where I saw a friend I had met in El Paso when he was in the army. Sensing the anarchic restlessness in me, he tried to persuade me not to go to New York yet. (And through him—because I had given most of my separation money to my mother and what I had was running out—I got a job cleaning autumn yards.) In the afternoons, in that quiet city—especially quiet now that summer was over for the University students and the fall term hadnt yet begun—my friend and I would walk through the campus, along the lake.... And at the same time that I felt myself being lulled by the serenity of the lake and the soon-to-fade green of the scenery, the craving for a certain life drew me away from them. Because even before I got there, New York had become a symbol of my liberated self, and I knew that it was in a kind of turbulence that that self must attempt to find itself. After my separation from the army, I had come into my first contact with the alluring anarchic world which promised such turbulence. On my way to El Paso, I had stopped in Dallas for about a week, to postpone facing my mother with my decision to leave El Paso. In Dallas— suddenly! —with the excitement of someone exploring a new country I discovered that world. As abruptly as that, it happened; that sudden, that immediate: One day, nothing, and the next it was there... as if a trapdoor had Opened. Those days in Dallas, without entering it then, I explored the surface of that seething world; and from the isolation of my early years and the equally isolated time in the army—purposely apart from everyone—I resolved to free myself swiftly, to leave my place by the Window, uninvolved with life, and hurl myself into its boiling midst. But it had to be after I had faced my mother again. I couldnt tell why I was determinedly taking that journey. Perhaps in part it was because of the obsessive ravenous narcissism craving attention. Whatever it was, it was a compulsion for which I didnt have clear-cut reasons. I only knew that in the world I had discovered and not yet entered there was a desperation which somehow matched—and justified—my own.... And although, now, to you, this sounds unclear, I’ll clarify it very soon.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She was gazing at me with an ambiguous expression that seemed half amusement, half distaste. ‘You’re rather keen on her, ain’t you?’ she said then. I looked away, and didn’t answer her at once. When I spoke at last it was not to her at all, but to the darkness. ‘When I see her,’ I said, ‘it’s like - I don’t know what it’s like. It’s like I never saw anything at all before. It’s like I am filling up, like a wine-glass when it’s filled with wine. I watch the acts before her and they are like nothing - they’re like dust. Then she walks on the stage and - she is so pretty; and her suit is so nice; and her voice is so sweet ... She makes me want to smile and weep, at once. She makes me sore, here.’ I placed a hand upon my chest, upon the breast-bone. ‘I never saw a girl like her before. I never knew that there were girls like her ...’ My voice became a trembling whisper then, and I found that I could say no more. There was another silence. I opened my eyes and looked at Alice - and knew at once that I shouldn’t have spoken; that I should have been as dumb and as cunning with her as with the rest of them. There was a look on her face - it was not ambiguous at all now - a look of mingled shock, and nervousness, and embarrassment or shame. I had said too much. I felt as if my admiration for Kitty Butler had lit a beacon inside me, and opening my unguarded mouth had sent a shaft of light into the darkened room, illuminating all. I had said too much - but it was that, or say nothing. Alice’s eyes held my own for a moment longer, then her lashes fluttered and fell. She didn’t speak; she only rolled away from me, and faced the wall. The weather continued very fierce that week. The sun brought trippers to Whitstable and to our Parlour, but the heat jaded their appetites. They called as often, now, for tea and lemonade, as for plaice and mackerel, and for hours at a time I would leave Mother and Alice to work the shop, and run down to the beach to ladle out cockles and crab-meat and whelks, and bread-and-butter, at Father’s stall. It was a novelty, serving teas upon the shingle; but it was also hard to stand in the sun, with the vinegar running from your wrists to your elbows, and your eyes smarting from the fumes of it.

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

  My résumé said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a twenty-four-year-old man in full… So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid? Worse, like the same shy, pale, rail-thin kid I’d always been. Maybe because I still hadn’t experienced anything of life. Least of all its many temptations and excitements. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette, hadn’t tried a drug. I hadn’t broken a rule, let alone a law. The 1960s were just under way, the age of rebellion, and I was the only person in America who hadn’t yet rebelled. I couldn’t think of one time I’d cut loose, done the unexpected. I’d never even been with a girl. If I tended to dwell on all the things I wasn’t, the reason was simple. Those were the things I knew best. I’d have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. Like all my friends I wanted to be successful. Unlike my friends I didn’t know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Wife? Kids? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them, instinctively. But deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all… different. I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win. No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose. And then it happened. As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me, exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play. Yes, I thought, that’s it. That’s the word. The secret of happiness, I’d always suspected, the essence of beauty or truth, or all we ever need to know of either, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life. At different times I’d fantasized about becoming a great novelist, a great journalist, a great statesman. But the ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. Sadly, fate had made me good, not great. At twenty-four I was finally resigned to that fact. I’d run track at Oregon, and I’d distinguished myself, lettering three of four years. But that was that, the end.

• From Educated (2018)

  Charles called a few days later. I was standing in my room after a day of roofing. I smelled of paint thinner and was covered in dust the color of ash, but he didn’t know that. We talked for two hours. He called the next night, and the one after. He said we should get a burger on Friday. —ON THURSDAY, AFTER I’D finished scrapping, I drove forty miles to the nearest Walmart and bought a pair of women’s jeans and two shirts, both blue. When I put them on, I barely recognized my own body, the way it narrowed and curved. I took them off immediately, feeling that somehow they were immodest. They weren’t, not technically, but I knew why I wanted them—for my body, so it would be noticed—and that seemed immodest even if the clothes were not. The next afternoon, when the crew had finished for the day, I ran to the house. I showered, blasting away the dirt, then I laid the new clothes on my bed and stared at them. After several minutes, I put them on and was again shocked by the sight of myself. There wasn’t time to change so I wore a jacket even though it was a warm evening, and at some point, though I can’t say when or why, I decided that I didn’t need the jacket after all. For the rest of the night, I didn’t have to remember to be Shannon; I talked and laughed without pretending at all. Charles and I spent every evening together that week. We haunted public parks and ice cream shops, burger joints and gas stations. I took him to Stokes, because I loved it there, and because the assistant manager would always give me the unsold doughnuts from the bakery. We talked about music—about bands I’d never heard of and about how he wanted to be a musician and travel the world. We never talked about us—about whether we were friends or something else. I wished he would bring it up but he didn’t. I wished he would let me know some other way—by gently taking my hand or putting an arm around me—but he didn’t do that, either. On Friday we stayed out late, and when I came home the house was dark. Mother’s computer was on, the screen saver casting a green light over the living room. I sat down and mechanically checked BYU’s website. Grades had been posted. I’d passed. More than passed. I’d earned A’s in every subject except Western Civ. I would get a scholarship for half of my tuition. I could go back. Charles and I spent the next afternoon in the park, rocking lazily in tire swings. I told him about the scholarship. I’d meant it as a brag, but for some reason my fears came out with it. I said I shouldn’t even be in college, that I should be made to finish high school first. Or to at least start it.