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