Outline

by Rachel Cusk

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.

the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but looking around himself in early middle age my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living.

Gradually, he said, this gap, this distance between how things were and how I wanted them to be, began to undermine me. I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled 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.

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. But there must have been moments when he had glimpsed – even if only briefly – what she would become.

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

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.

Each of them wanted more than anything to be declared right, and the other wrong, but it was impossible to assign blame entirely to either of them. 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.

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.

I told him that his taking a photograph was, in fact, the thing that stood out in my mind from that day. I remembered thinking that it was an unusual thing to do, or at least a thing I would not have thought to do myself. It marked some difference between him and me, in that he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it. It was one of those moments, I said, that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic to me.

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. While I spoke Paniotis looked more and more aghast. That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could have come up with, he said.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I had this feeling,’ she continued, ‘which I have had since and which gets worse each time we argue, that we were caught in a net of words, tangled up in all these strings and knots, and that each of us thought there was something we could say that would set us free, but the more words we spoke the more tangles and knots there were.

Why say anything, if you can just take it back the next minute? Yet of course I wanted it to be taken back. And even thinking about it now the whole thing seems slightly unreal, as though by allowing it to be taken back I can no longer be sure that it actually happened.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?