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A suitably versatile definition that I like, borrowing from researcher Samuele Marcora, is that endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.”5 That’s actually Marcora’s description of “effort” rather than endurance (a distinction we’ll explore further in Chapter 4), but it captures both the physical and mental aspects of endurance. What’s crucial is the need to override what your instincts are telling you to do (slow down, back off, give up), and the sense of elapsed time. Taking a punch without flinching requires self-control, but endurance implies something more sustained: holding your finger in the flame long enough to feel the heat; filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.
During the last two days 500 million dollars had been drained from the nation’s banking system. They were convinced that the New York bankers did not understand the enormity of the disaster and must be protected. Mills and Woodin agreed that Lehman must be persuaded to close the New York banks and that Horner must also declare a moratorium for Illinois. Horner proclaimed his holiday at 2 A.M.; Lehman’s decision came at 4:20 A.M. Hoover was told at 6 A.M. “We are at the end of our string,” he said. “There is nothing more we can do.” The financial heart of the country had stopped beating. Banking in every state was wholly or partly suspended. Flags flew in Wall Street honoring the inauguration, but the Stock Exchange was officially closed, and so, for the first time in eighty-five years, was the Chicago Board of Trade.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
At 7 A.M. Hawaiian time on Sunday, December 7, 1941, near Kahuku Point at the northernmost reach of the island of Oahu, two U.S. Army privates in the process of shutting down the Opana mobile radar station, an aircraft reconnaissance unit which they had manned since 4 A.M., noticed an unusual disturbance on their oscilloscope screen.1526 They checked and confirmed no malfunction and decided the large merged blur of light “must be a flight of some sort.” Their plotting board indicated a bearing out of the northeast at a distance of 132 miles. More than fifty planes appeared to be involved. One of the men called the information center at Fort Shafter, at the other end of the island, where radar and visual reconnaissance reports were combined on a tabletop map. The lieutenant who took the phone heard the radar operator call the sightings “the biggest . . . he had ever seen.”1527 The operator did not, however, report his estimate of their number.
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
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