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.

I believe finally that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.

LaRue’s father was an alcoholic in a time before the language of addiction and empathy had been invented, when alcoholics weren’t called alcoholics, they were called drunks.

He had a short fuse, that was just fact and anybody in the valley could have told you as much. He was weatherworn inside and out, as taut and rugged as the horses he ran wild on the mountain.

In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquility born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.

proselytizing

inscrutable,

detached,

dispassi...

one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune.

He can’t explain where the conviction came from, or how it burned brightly enough to shine through the black uncertainty.

It was liquid, it was air. It was rock one moment and wind the next.

I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.

He seemed in a state of constant transition, phasing in and out of dimensions, unsure whether to be my father’s son or his wife’s husband.