Outline

by Rachel Cusk

But the only hope of finding anything is to stay exactly where you are, at the agreed place. It’s just a question of how long you can hold out.

in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

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. When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was the more real?

‘It is surely not true,’ the girl sitting next to him said, with an expression of perplexity, ‘that there is no story of life; that one’s own existence doesn’t have a distinct form that has begun and will one day end, that has its own themes and events and cast of characters.’

She herself, on the way here, had passed an open window from which had drifted the sound of someone practising the piano. The building, it so happened, was a music college of the kind she herself had left two years before, abandoning her lifelong hopes of becoming a professional musician; she recognised the piece as the D minor fugue from Bach’s French Suites, a piece she had always loved and that caused her, hearing it so unexpectedly, to feel there on the pavement the most extraordinary sense of loss. It was as though the music had once belonged to her and now no longer did; as though she had been excluded from its beauty, was being forced to see it in the possession of someone else, and to revisit in its entirety her own sadness at her inability, for a number of reasons, to remain in that world. Certainly another person, she said, passing that window and hearing the D minor fugue, would have felt something completely different. In itself, the music coming out of the window means nothing at all, and whatever the feelings that might be attached to it, none of them had caused the music to be played in the first place, or the window to be left open so that the sound of it could be heard by passers-by. And even a person observing these events, she said, from across the road, could not have guessed, simply by seeing and hearing, what the story really was. What they would have seen was a girl walking past, at the same time as hearing some music being played from inside a build...

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.

Looking back, those were some of the best times of her life, though at the time they had had the feeling of a prelude, a period of waiting, as though for the real drama of living to begin.

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.