Educated¶

Tara Westover《你当像鸟飞往你的山》英文原文摘抄

My father was not a tall man but he was able to command a room. He had a presence about him, the solemnity of an oracle.
There was a morning chill despite the bright sunlight.
as if by not doing it, she had inconvenienced everyone.
Mother sat quietly, eyes closed, lips tight, her whole expression momentarily solid. Then the expression dissolved and she said, in her small voice, I'm not a midwife, just an assistant.
a young man with an appetite for unconventionality.
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.
They were far away. Dwarfed by the mountain, hushed by the wind.
Mother never told us that her family had opposed the engagement but we knew. There were traces the decades hadn't erased.
The professor recited facts in a dull, earthy voice. 土质的，粗俗的
This was the second severing of mother and daughter. The tape was playing in a loop. 割裂、撕裂；环形
God couldn't abide faithlessness, Dad said. That's why the most hateful sinners were those who wouldn't make up their minds, who used herbs and medication both, who came to Mother on Wednesday and saw their doctor on Friday—or, as Dad put it, "Who worship at the altar of God one day and offer a sacrifice to Satan the next." These people were like the ancient Israelites because they'd been given a true religion but hankered after false idols.
It was a sort of sigh, a long, drawn-out leaking of breath, that finished with her eyes rolling upward in a lazy imitation of exasperation.
I squared my stance, ready to argue. 立场
The silence settled, its presence heavy.
The days slipped away quickly, as days do when you're dreading something.
And he wore a brilliant smile.
The rest of the trip blurs in my memory, leaving me with only snapshots—of Mother muscle-testing remedies for Grandma.
wrapped in a reflective blanket.
All this would happen in seconds, a year of training reduced to a single, desperate moment.
"If you know what you're doing," he said, "you can incapacitate a man with minimal effort. You can control someone's whole body with two fingers. It's about knowing where the weak points are, and how to exploit them." He grabbed my wrist and folded it, bending my fingers downward so they reached uncomfortably toward the inside of my forearm. He continued to add pressure until I twisted slightly, wrapping my arm behind my back to relieve the strain.

"See? This is a weak point," he said. "If I fold it any more, you'll be immobilized." He grinned his angel grin. "I won't, though, because it'd hurt like hell."
"You're not my little sister," Shawn said. "You're my sittle ister." He pronounced the words lazily, blunting the f's to d's so that it sounded like "siddle lister."
"She's got fish eyes," he said.

"Fish eyes?"

"Yup, fish eyes. They're dead stupid, fish. They're beautiful, but their heads're as empty as a tire."
You have lovely eyes, he said. Just like a fish.
One night, he came home late and in a strange mood. Everyone was asleep except me, and I was on the sofa, reading a chapter of scripture before bed. Shawn plopped down next to me. "Get me a glass of water."

"You break your leg?" I said.

"Get it, or I won't drive you to town tomorrow."

I fetched the water. As I handed it over, I saw the smile on his face and without thinking dumped the whole thing on his head. I made it down the hall and was nearly to my room when he caught me. "Apologize," he said. Water dripped from his nose onto his T-shirt. "No."

He grabbed a fistful of my hair, a large clump, his grip fixed near the root to give him greater leverage, and dragged me into the bathroom. I groped at the door, catching hold of the frame, but he lifted me off the ground, flattened my arms against my body, then dropped my head into the toilet. "Apologize," he said again. I said nothing. He stuck my head in further, so my nose scraped the stained porcelain. I closed my eyes, but the smell wouldn't let me forget where I was.

I tried to imagine something else, something that would take me out of myself, but the image that came to mind was of Sadie, crouching, compliant. It pumped me full of bile. He held me there, my nose touching the bowl, for perhaps a minute, then he let me up. The tips of my hair were wet; my scalp was raw.
He dropped my wrist and I fell to the floor. I could hear his steps moving down the hall. I stood and quietly locked the bathroom door, then I stared into the mirror at the girl clutching her wrist. Her eyes were glassy and drops slid down her cheeks. I hated her for her weakness, for having a heart to break. That he could hurt her, that anyone could hurt her like that, was inexcusable.

I'm only crying from the pain, I told myself. From the pain in my wrist. Not from anything else.

This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn't affect me, that he didn't affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn't understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.
He'd come to my room an hour later, his eyes glassy, his voice croaking, and asked me to forgive him.
At Audrey's wedding, seeing my brothers in their suits, those black uniforms, my rage turned to fear, of some predetermined loss.
I was hallucinating.
The passage described the great prophet Mormon, a fact I'd found confusing. A woman could never be a prophet, yet here was Tyler, telling me I reminded him of one of the greatest prophets of all. I still don't know what he meant by it, but what I understood at the time was that I could trust myself: that there was something in me, something like what was in the prophets, and that it was not male or female, not old or young; a kind of worth that was inherent and unshakable. 内在的，固有的
I understood the theory of fractions but struggled to manipulate them. 操纵，摆布
Then I understood why I hadn't come sooner. I'd been afraid of how I would feel, afraid that if he died, I might be glad.
He did succumb to rages, moments of blind anger when all he wanted was to hurt someone.
These rages changed, and worsened, as his physical strength improved, and I found myself cleaning the toilet every morning, knowing my head might be inside it before lunch. Mother said I was the only one who could calm him, and I persuaded myself that that was true. Who better? I thought. He doesn't affect me.

Reflecting on it now, I'm not sure the injury changed him that much, but I convinced myself that it had, and that any cruelty on his part was entirely new. I can read my journals from this period and trace the evolution—of a young girl rewriting her history. In the reality she constructed for herself nothing had been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet. I wish I had my best friend back, she wrote. Before his injury, I never got hurt at all.
The night was black—that thick darkness that belongs only in backcountry, where the houses are few and the streetlights fewer.
They were beautiful, but to me their beauty seemed aggressive, menacing.
Then I went straight to the computer lab to look up the word "Holocaust."
When you chop a chicken's head off, you shouldn't smile because you might get blood and feathers in your mouth.
It was wild, he said, and in the wild that wound is fatal.
It didn't belong. It couldn't be taught to belong.
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. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward. 看出、觉察出
I could not see a counselor. To see one would be to ask for help, and I believed myself invincible.
That from somewhere inside that brittle shell—in that girl made vacant by the fiction of invincibility—there was a spark left.
While my father and brother shouted, ignorance kept me silent: I couldn't defend myself, because I didn't understand the accusation.