Educated

The lecturer began his presentation. He spoke calmly but moved through
the material quickly, as if he assumed we were already familiar with it. This
was confirmed by the other students, most of whom were not taking notes. I
scribbled down every word.
“So what are Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts?” the lecturer asked. Nearly
everyone raised a hand. The lecturer called on the student who had studied at
Oxford. “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.” I was reminded for a moment of Richard, who
had always seemed able to recite with exactness anything he’d ever read.
“Very good,” the lecturer said. “And the second?”
“Positive liberty,” another student said, “is freedom from internal
constraints.”
I wrote this definition in my notes, but I didn’t understand it.
The lecturer tried to clarify. He said 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.
I had no idea what it meant to self-coerce. I looked around the room. No
one else seemed confused. I was one of the few students taking notes. I
wanted to ask for further explanation, but something stopped me—the
certainty that to do so would be to shout to the room that I didn’t belong
there.
After the lecture, I returned to my room, where I stared out my window at
the stone gate with its medieval battlements. I thought of positive liberty, and
of what it might mean to self-coerce, until my head thrummed with a dull
ache.
I called home. Mother answered. Her voice rose with excitement when she
recognized my weepy “Hello, Mom.” I told her I shouldn’t have come to
Cambridge, that I didn’t understand anything. She said she’d been muscle-
testing and had discovered that one of my chakras was out of balance. She
could adjust it, she said. I reminded her that I was five thousand miles away.
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll adjust the chakra on Audrey and wing
it to you.”
“You’ll what it to me?”
“Wing it,” she said. “Distance is nothing to living energy. I can send the
corrected energy to you from here.”