-
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 ^7NoThkV07
- perhaps wordOfTheYear should be liberty
- free from self-coercion. I am often coerced by my fears and my expectations. Covid has played a role in influencing me to impose restrictions on myself
Author:: Tara Westover
Full Title:: Educated
Tags:#media/book
- themes::
- theme 1
- Summary::
- summary 1
* Highlights first synced by Readwise 2021-01-06
* I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. ([Location 121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=121))
* when the landscape is visible only as darkness and lighter darkness, and you feel the world around you more than you see it. ([Location 214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=214))
* **Tags**: [[blue]]
* Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone. ([Location 659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=659))
* **Tags**: [[blue]]
* In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand. ([Location 1097](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=1097))
* understood that no future could hold them; no destiny could tolerate him and her. I would remain a child, in perpetuity, always, or I would lose him. ([Location 2202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=2202))
* I WAS HOARDING MY PAYCHECKS, in case I needed the money for tuition. Dad noticed and started charging me for small things. ([Location 2266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=2266))
* My thoughts wandered wildly, feverishly, through a fog of resentment. The state was dreamlike, as if the hysteria had freed me from a fiction that, five minutes before, I had needed to believe. ([Location 2423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=2423))
* The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter. I am a traitor, a wolf among sheep; there is something different about me and that difference is not good. I want to bellow, to weep into my father’s knees and promise never to do it again. But wolf that I am, I am still above lying, and anyway he would sniff the lie. We both know that if I ever again find Shawn on the highway, soaked in crimson, I will do exactly what I have just done. I am not sorry, merely ashamed. ([Location 2452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=2452))
* There was silence. Not a hush, not a muting of the noise, but utter, almost violent silence. No papers shuffled, no pencils scratched. ([Location 2571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=2571))
* MY MEMORIES OF THE UNIVERSITY faded quickly. The scratch of pencils on paper, the clack of a projector moving to the next slide, the peal of the bells signaling the end of class—all were drowned out by the clatter of iron and the roar of diesel engines. After a month in the junkyard, BYU seemed like a dream, something I’d conjured. Now I was awake. ([Location 2773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=2773))
* **Note**: How the environment changes your literal identity
* so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested. ([Location 2941](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=2941))
* remain, my memories set down alongside his. There was a boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out either the one page or the other. To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don’t know. I just don’t know. ([Location 3189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=3189))
* My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs. ([Location 3193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=3193))
* I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money. ([Location 3343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=3343))
* There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble. ([Location 3851](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=3851))
* 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. ([Location 4070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=4070))
* 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. ([Location 4152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=4152))
* There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing. ([Location 4254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=4254))
* If I was insane, everything could be made to make sense. If I was sane, nothing could. This logic seemed damning. It was also a relief. I was not evil; I was clinical. ([Location 4672](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=4672))
* How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family. ([Location 4753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=4753))
* An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor. ([Location 4759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=4759))
* Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me. ([Location 4824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=4824))
* There was only shifting sand, shifting loyalties, shifting histories. ([Location 4911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=4911))
* I had wanted to escape the maze with its disorienting switchbacks, its ever-modulating pathways, to find the precious thing. But now I understood: the precious thing, that was the maze. That’s all that was left of the life I’d had here: a puzzle whose rules I would never understand, because they were not rules at all but a kind of cage meant to enclose me. I could stay, and search for what had been home, or I could go, now, before the walls shifted and the way out was shut. ([Location 4912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=4912))
* But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. ([Location 5177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=5177))
* Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed—how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance—I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house. ([Location 5192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=5192))
* We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories. Nothing has revealed that truth to me more than writing this memoir—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. This is the best I can do: to tell that other story next to the one I remember. Of a summer day, a fire, the scent of charred flesh, and a father helping his son down the mountain. ([Location 5245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B072BLVM83&location=5245))