## Metadata - Author: [[Tobias Wolff]] - Full Title: Old School - Category: #books ## Highlights - How did they command such deference—English teachers? Compared to the men who taught physics or biology, what did they really know of the world? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that they knew exactly what was most worth knowing. Unlike our math and science teachers, who modestly stuck to their subjects, they tended to be polymaths. Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or a novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They’d stitch it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion, and even, on occasion, science. ([Location 59](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=59)) - I’d written fragment beneath most of the poems in the notebooks, and this description was in every case accurate. Each of them had been composed in some fever of ardor or philosophy that deserted me before I could bring it to the point of significance. ([Location 107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=107)) - The absence of an actual girl to compete for meant that every other prize became feminized. For honors in sport, scholarship, music, and writing we cracked our heads together like mountain rams, and to make your mark as a writer was equal as proof of puissance to a brilliant season on the gridiron. ([Location 213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=213)) - Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege—the power to create images of the system they stood apart from, and thereby to judge it. ([Location 367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=367)) - It’s a wonder we’re not all barking. And of course we would be if we hadn’t any way to use self-consciousness against itself, or rather against its worst inclinations—morbidity, narcissism, paranoia, grandiosity, that lot. We have somehow to turn a profit on it. Which is, I must say, exactly what that story of yours does. ([Location 1779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=1779)) - The life that produces writing can’t be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee. No true account can be given of how or why you became a writer, nor is there any moment of which you can say: This is when I became a writer. It all gets cobbled together later, more or less sincerely, and after the stories have been repeated they put on the badge of memory and block all other routes of exploration. There’s something to be said for this. It’s efficient, and may even provide a homeopathic tincture of the truth. ([Location 2157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=2157)) - You should keep writing. Mmm, don’t think so. Too frivolous. Know what I mean? It just cuts you off and makes you selfish and doesn’t really do any good. This actually shocked me. We know what is sacred to us when we recoil from impiety, and Susan’s casual desertion of her gift had exactly that force. ([Location 2267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=2267)) - The fact that a writer needed solitude didn’t mean he was cut off or selfish. A writer was like a monk in his cell praying for the world—something he performed alone, but for other people. Then to say it did no good! How could she say that? Of course it did good. And I stood there half-drunk and adrift in this bay of snoring men, and gave thanks for all the good it had done me. ([Location 2275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=2275)) - Memory is a dream to begin with, and what I had was a dream of memory, not to be put to the test. ([Location 2311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=2311)) - The truth wanted to be sought after but it would let itself be seen now and then, and this happened to Arch most often while he was teaching. He’d been a reader since childhood, and the habit had deepened during his years of travel for the Forbes-Farragut shipping line, but until he began teaching he’d rarely had occasion to talk about what he read. He could read a story like “The Minister’s Black Veil” and both shrink from and relish the soul-chill it worked on him without having to fix that response in words, or explain how Hawthorne had produced it. Teaching made him accountable for his thoughts, and as he became accountable for them he had more of them, and they became sharper and deeper. It was the nature of literature to behave like the fallen world it contemplated, this dusky ground where subterfuge reigns and certainty is folly, and Arch felt like some master of hounds as he led the boys deep into a story or poem, driving them on with questions, forcing them to test cadence, gesture, and inflection for feint and doubletalk until at last the truth showed its face for an instant before vanishing into some new possibility of meaning. ([Location 2451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=2451)) - Up to the moment he resigned he must have imagined that teaching was a distraction from some greater destiny still his for the taking. Of course he hadn’t said this to himself, but he’d surely felt it, he later decided, because how else could he not have known how useless he would be thereafter? For thirty years he had lived in conversation with boys, answerable to their own sense of how things worked, to their skepticism, and, most gravely, to their trust. Even when alone he had read and thought in their imagined presence, made responsible by it, enlivened and honed by it. Now he read in solitude and thought in solitude and hardly felt himself to be alive. ([Location 2577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC28A8&location=2577))