Educated

by Tara Westover

The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. —VIRGINIA WOOLF

Isaiah Berlin.

“Negative liberty,” he said, “is the freedom from external obstacles or constraints. An individual is free in this sense if they are not physically prevented from taking action.”

positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.

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.

“It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women.

Shear.

when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.

I understand where the shame had come from: it wasn’t that I hadn’t studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn’t a diplomat. It wasn’t that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.

I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given,

I didn’t dare do anything that might break the spell of waiting. In that moment part of me believed, as I had always believed, that it would be me who broke the spell, who caused it to break. When the stillness shattered and his fury rushed at me, I would know that something I had done was the catalyst, the cause. There is hope in such a superstition; there is the illusion of control.

how a person ought to weigh their special obligations to kin against their obligations to society as a whole.

If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second?

“The Family, Morality, and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890.”

trying to pin down the people I love on paper, to capture the whole meaning of them in a few words, which is of course impossible.