Educated: A Memoir

dilapidated

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis.

I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant.

WAITING FOR CHRISTMAS THAT year felt like waiting to walk off the edge of a cliff.

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.

I began to read—Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill.

flinched.

“Holocaust.”

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.