## Metadata - Author: [[Tobias Wolff]] - Full Title: In Pharaoh's Army - Category: #books ## Highlights - Toward morning, wet, filthy, weaving on my feet as two drill sergeants took turns yelling in my face, I looked across the platoon bay at the morose rank of men waiting their ration of abuse, and saw in one mud-caked face a sudden lunatic flash of teeth. The guy was grinning. At me. In complicity, as if he knew me, had always known me, and knew exactly how to throw the switch that turned the most miserable luck, the worst degradations and prospects, into my choicest amusements. Like this endless night, this insane, ghastly scene. ([Location 679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=679)) - They kept me on to produce a farce. That was how I became an officer in the United States Army. ([Location 795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=795)) - I don’t know what made me look up this one time. Maybe I heard a new sound under the engine clatter and the whapping of the blades, a sound I didn’t even know I was hearing, a different sound than what my self-loving body had recorded as acceptable to its interests. ([Location 1214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=1214)) - In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don’t look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries. You encourage yourself with charms, omens, rites of propitiation. Without your knowledge or permission the bottom-line caveman belief in blood sacrifice, one life buying another, begins to steal into your bones. How could it not? All around you people are killed: soldiers on both sides, farmers, teachers, mothers, fathers, schoolgirls, nurses, your friends—but not you. They have been killed instead of you. This observation is unavoidable. So, in time, is the corollary, implicit in the word instead: in place of. They have been killed in place of you—in your place. You don’t think it out, not at the time, not in those terms, but you can’t help but feel it, and go on feeling it. It’s the close call you have to keep escaping from, the unending doubt that you have a right to your own life. It’s the corruption suffered by everyone who lives on, that henceforth they must wonder at the reason, and probe its justice. ([Location 1264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=1264)) - It was a gasp of a thought, ([Location 1289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=1289)) - Our headlights glared back at us from the glassy wall of falling rain. ([Location 2005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2005)) - The pipe, the idea of myself smoking a pipe, alone at the railing, gave me a gallant and philosophical picture of myself. I smoked my pipe and gazed over the city, over the people below, to whom I felt superior because I was feeling deep and dark things of which they were ignorant. ([Location 2137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2137)) - it was my duty to return and introduce these backward folk to the notion of consequence. ([Location 2139](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2139)) - The courtyard was still. The air had an ochre tint. I looked around at what had been done here. This was my work, this desolation had blown straight from my own heart. I marked the discovery coolly, as if for future study. This was, I understood, something to be remembered, though I had no idea what that would mean. I couldn’t guess how the memory would live on in me, shadowing my sense of entitlement to an inviolable home; touching me, years hence, in my own home, with the certainty that some terrible wing is even now descending, bringing justice. ([Location 2342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2342)) - I thought of my friends and family as a circle, and this was exactly the picture that stopped me cold and kept me where I was. It didn’t seem possible to stand in the center of that circle. I did not feel equal to it. ([Location 2475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2475)) - I had come back to Manhattan Beach, I surely understood even then, because there could no longer be any question of judgment between my father and me. He’d lost his claim to the high ground, and so had I. We could take each other now without any obligation to approve or disapprove or model our virtues. It was freedom, and we both grabbed at it. It was the best night we’d ever had. ([Location 2512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2512)) - the sodden sensation of uselessness. ([Location 2537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2537)) - How do you tell such a terrible story? Maybe such a story shouldn’t be told at all. Yet finally it will be told. But as soon as you open your mouth you have problems, problems of recollection, problems of tone, ethical problems. How can you judge the man you were now that you’ve escaped his circumstances, his fears and desires, now that you hardly remember who he was? And how can you honestly avoid judging him? But isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it? And isn’t it just like an American boy, to want you to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart? And in the end who gives a damn, who’s listening? What do you owe the listener, and which listener do you owe? ([Location 2646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2646)) - In the past she’d counted on me to control my moods so that she could give free rein to her own and still have a ticket back. Now I was as touchy and ungoverned as Vera, and often worse. ([Location 2705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2705)) - I had begun another novel. I knew it wasn’t very good, but I also knew that it was the best I could do just then and that I had to keep doing it if I ever wanted to get any better. These words would never be read by anyone, I understood, but even in sinking out of sight they made the ground more solid under my hope to write well. Not that I didn’t like what I was writing as I filled up the pages. Only at the end of the day, reading over what I’d done, working through it with a green pencil, did I see how far I was from where I wanted to be. In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won’t see for years, and can’t be sure you’ll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it. ([Location 2713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2713)) - Instead of remembering Hugh as I knew him, I too often think of him in terms of what he never had a chance to be. The things the rest of us know, he will not know. He will not know what it is to make a life with someone else. To have a child slip in beside him as he lies reading on a Sunday morning. To work at, and then look back on, a labor of years. Watch the decline of his parents, and attend their dissolution. Lose faith. Pray anyway. Persist. We are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That’s how we find out who we are. ([Location 2783](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004089HX4&location=2783))