Outline

by Rachel Cusk

My parents fought all their lives, he said, and no one ever won. But no one ran away either. It is the children who have run away.

What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

When he spoke of her fondly, it was the earlier version of herself he was speaking of. I said that I didn’t believe people could change so completely, could evolve an unrecognisable morality; it was merely that that part of themselves had lain dormant, waiting to be evoked by circumstance. 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. I

But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me.

There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain.

I could weep just to think that I’ll never see you again as you were at the age of six – I would give anything, she said, to meet that six-year-old one more time. But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.

out, it is the very thing you don’t see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you. And how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?

In my own case, I sometimes wonder whether it was the very happiness of my childhood that has meant I have had to be taught how to suffer. I seem to have been exceptionally slow to understand where pain comes from, and how it comes. It has taken me a long time to learn to avoid it. I read

‘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.

feeling a strange ache almost of homesickness for them, which became a feeling of longing for my own children, who suddenly seemed so far away that it was hard to believe they even existed.

And I don’t compose myself from other people’s ideas, any more than I compose a verse from someone else’s poem.’