Outline

by Rachel Cusk

I said that I thought most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.

It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.

It struck me that some people might think I was stupid, to go out alone on a boat with a man I didn’t know. But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.

He didn’t once glance back at me, for people are at their least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

The water was so clear and still and cool, and the shapes of the coastline so soft and ancient, with the little island nearby that seemed to belong to nobody. I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. I could swim out into the sea as far as I liked, if what I wanted was to drown. Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it, despite having proved that everything about it was illusory.

I thought often of the chapter in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff and Cathy stare from the dark garden through the windows of the Lintons’ drawing room and watch the brightly lit family scene inside. What is fatal in that vision is its subjectivity: looking through the window the two of them see different things, Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they really are. And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own.

Appearances, my neighbour replied, were highly valued in his own family, but he had learned – perhaps fatally – to view them as a mechanism of deception and disguise.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living.

What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy: it was as though everything that had been inside was moved outside, piece by piece, like furniture being taken out of a house and put on the pavement. There seemed to be so much of it, because what had been invisible was now visible; what had been useful was now redundant. Their antagonism was in exact proportion to their former harmony, but where the harmony had been timeless and weightless, the antagonism occupied space and time. The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality. If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse. And what is astonishing is how much detail it gathers to itself, so that nothing remains untouched by it.

And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.

You learn very quickly, he said, that your children are exempt only from your own judgement. If the world finds them wanting, you have to take them back.

– but he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.

The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?

The problem is, they said, he has no fear. But it seems to me that exactly the reverse is true: he has too much fear, so much that he is driven to enact the thing of which he is afraid, lest it should happen of its own accord.

I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.

But they have a seriousness I envied, as though they had not been distracted, were never distracted from the reality of their own lives.

‘For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ‘the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute,

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I almost wonder whether the exhaustion I felt when we returned from Berlin was in fact the collective exhaustion of these women, which they refused to feel themselves and so had passed on to me.

Their shoes were the only inelegant thing about them,’ she said, ‘yet I felt they were the key to the whole mystery of their nature, for they were the shoes of a woman without vanity.

When I think back to the time before, and especially to the years of my marriage, it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion. We never, I think, discovered the true nature of the things we saw, any more than we were ever in danger of being affected by them; we peered at them, at people and places, like people on a ship peer at the passing mainland, and should we have seen them in any kind of trouble, or they us, there would have been nothing whatever either one of us could have done about it.

I can see us there still,’ he said, ‘for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them,’ he said, ‘despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing in our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were.

Then I asked each of them to tell me something they had noticed on their way here.

‘I would like’, she resumed, ‘to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown, where I have no identity and no associations. But how such a thing could be accomplished, and even where such a place might be, I have no idea; not to mention the relationships and responsibilities themselves,’ she concluded, ‘which drive me mad but at the same time make escape from them impossible.’

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps, he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost.

I sat on the padded bench, his naked back once more before my eyes, the wind scouring the deck, and thought of the strange transitions from enchantment to disenchantment and back again that moved through human affairs like cloudbanks, sometimes portentous and grey and sometimes mere distant inscrutable shapes that blotted out the sun for a while and then just as carelessly revealed it again.

in Greek legend, the father of Theseus threw himself when he saw his son’s ship returning to land wearing the black sail that conveyed, wrongly, the news of his death.

I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying – it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become – to put it bluntly – anathema to me. There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

For instance the word ellipsis, he’d been told, could literally be translated as ‘to hide behind silence’.

She wasn’t quite sure how the language barrier was going to work: it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect; until you remembered something you needed that you had had to leave behind. She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language: in English she was by and large a humorous person, but in Spanish for instance – which at one time she had spoken quite well – she was not. So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew: it was an interesting thought. There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable.

She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language: in English she was by and large a humorous person, but in Spanish for instance – which at one time she had spoken quite well – she was not. So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew: it was an interesting thought.

But it had been a descent into chaos, a whirling realm of non-meaning, in which the absence of her husband had felt like the absence of a magnetic centre so that without it nothing made any sense at all. The polarisation of man and woman was a structure, a form: she had only felt it once it was gone, and it almost seemed as though the collapse of that structure, that equipoise, was responsible for the extremity that followed it. Her abandonment by one man, in other words, led directly to her attack by another, until the two things – the presence of the incident and the absence of her husband – came almost to seem like one. She had imagined the end of a marriage, she said, to be a slow disentangling of its meanings, a long and painful reinterpretation, but in her case it hadn’t been like that at all. At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind.

In a way, she accepted that he was only leaving her as he had found her a decade earlier, a penniless playwright with some actor friends and a large and worthless collection of second-hand books. Yet she was not, she had soon discovered, that person any more: she had become, through him, someone else. In a sense he had created her, and when she phoned him that day of the incident, she was, she supposed, referring herself back to him as his creation. Her links to the life before him had been completely severed – that person no longer existed, and so when the incident occurred it had been two kinds of crisis, one of which was a crisis of identity. She didn’t know, in other words, quite who it had happened to. This question of adaptation, therefore, might be said to be at the forefront of her mind. She was like someone who had forgotten their native language, an idea that likewise has always fascinated her. She found, after the incident, that she lacked what might be called a vocabulary, a native language of self: words, as the phrase goes, failed her for the first time in her life. She couldn’t describe what had happened, to herself or to other people. She talked about it, sure enough, talked about it incessantly – but in all her talk the thing itself remained untouched, shrouded and mysterious, inaccessible.

He was describing, she realised, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifelong habit of explaining herself, and she thought about this power of silence, which put people out of one another’s reach. Lately, since the incident – now that things had got harder to explain, and the explanations were harsher and bleaker – even her closest friends had started to tell her to stop talking about it, as though by talking about it she made it continue to exist. Yet if people were silent about the things that had happened to them, was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them? It was never said of history, for instance, that it shouldn’t be talked about; on the contrary, in terms of history silence was forgetting, and it was the thing people feared most of all, when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten.