Parade

by Rachel Cusk

The marginalised artist, like any marginalised person, is obliged to reckon with reality first.

To be made to feel you are in Italy, he continued, addressing Julia, when you are not in fact in Italy seems to me the saddest thing in the world. It is sad in the way dreams are, because they reveal something fundamentally confused in our grasp of truth. Nothing is more pitiful than to watch a dog dreaming he is chasing a rabbit, partly because a dog is one of the few creatures we can observe in this way, knowing what he thinks he is doing while seeing that he is not in fact doing it. I refuse to be that dog, he said, thinking that I am in Italy while the owner of this restaurant watches me through a spy-hole and rubs his hands together.