Outline

by Rachel Cusk

It was women, not men, who held authority; property was passed not from father to son but from mother to daughter.

In the world of his childhood, a son was already a disappointment; he himself, the last in a long line of such disappointments, was treated with a special ambivalence, in that his mother wished to believe he was a girl.

‘to imagine the world as it was in the heyday of my parents, in some ways so pleasurable and in others so callous.

among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.

The older he got, the more it represented to him a kind of home, a place to which he yearned to return.

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.

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.

life is sending you in one direction and you’re pulling away in another,

if there’s passion you find the time.

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

but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

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.

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.

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 world that happiness existed in has completely disappeared, not just in my own life

he has too much fear, so much that he is driven to enact the thing of which he is afraid,

I admit that I have sometimes felt afraid, even in places I’m quite familiar with.

being there without my husband caused me to feel, in an entirely new way, what I actually am.’

I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory:

She found, too, that illness had enabled her to view her life, and the people in it, with greater objectivity.

‘The parts of life that are suffocating’, Angeliki said, ‘are so often the parts that are the projection of our parents’ own desires.

I realised I felt angry, as I used to feel angry with my sisters and my brother when our mother gave her attention to them.

the possibility of failure in such a profession was as great as the possibility of success.

‘Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.’

‘the best way to confront our fears is to put them in costume,

There was no need to hurry, after all; we had all the time in the world.

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.