Outline

by Rachel Cusk

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.

Somehow we’ve become convinced that if we say even a word out of place we’ve marked them forever, but of course that is ridiculous, and in any case, why should their lives be perfect? It is our own idea of perfection that plagues us, and it is rooted in our own desires.

‘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 that our whole sense of life as a romance – even our conception of love itself – was a vision in which material things played far too great a role, and that without those things we might find that certain feelings diminished while others became accentuated.

Was she not angry with him, I said, for deserting her and leaving her to take care of the children alone? No, on the contrary, she was pleased to see him. We are completely honest with one another, she said, and so I knew when he came back that it was because he had accepted the way things were.

‘what this marriage was like, in which nobody had to make promises or apologise, in which you didn’t have to buy flowers for the other person or cook them a special meal or light the candles to make a flattering atmosphere, or book a holiday to help you get over your problems; or rather, in which you were made to do without those things and live together so honestly and nakedly.

it suggested that after all Olga was guilty of sentimentality, was capable of romance, only it was a romance of mother and child – and if she was capable of that, then why not everything?

her daughter had said that she didn’t see why it was necessary that men exist. There don’t need to be men, she had said, there only need to be mothers and children.

It was interesting to consider, said the longhaired boy – Georgeou, as my diagram now told me – that a story might merely be a series of events we believe ourselves to be involved in, but on which we have absolutely no influence at all.

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.

‘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, so to speak; to translate them, for the simple act of translation very often renders things harmless.

all that had happened was that she had passed the park where her grandmother used to take her in the afternoons when she was smaller. There was a little playground there, with a swing she used to sit on while her grandmother pushed her. This morning she had seen the playground as she passed, and had seen the swing, and had remembered her grandmother and the pleasant afternoons they spent together.

Her consciousness, at this point – she was forty-three years old – was so crammed full not just of her own memories, obligations, dreams, knowledge and the plethora of her day-to-day responsibilities, but also of other people’s – gleaned over years of listening, talking, empathising, worrying – that she was frightened most of all of the boundaries separating these numerous types of mental freight, the distinctions between them, crumbling away until she was no longer certain what had happened to her and what to other people she knew, or sometimes even what was or was not real.

‘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.

He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free.

Theirs was a calm and well-run home, with predictability – something he had always actively avoided, something he had, one could almost say, feared – as its cherished principle.

the story of men and women, for me, was ultimately a story of war, to the extent that I wondered sometimes whether I had an actual horror of peace, whether I sought to stir things up out of a fear of boredom that was also, you might say, a fear of death itself.

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.

I find that I still can’t forgive her,’

He was, I could see, a bad liar, and it was hard, I said, not to sympathise with his wife, the mother of his children, though that was obviously not the response he wanted to his story.

If he could only love what he did not know, and be loved in return on that same basis, then knowledge became an inexorable disenchantment, for which the only cure was to fall in love with someone new.

Elena came back and sat down again. Her appearance, this evening, was particularly Lorelei-like. She seemed to be composed entirely of curves and waves.

What she couldn’t stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily. She herself, she said, was quite willing to use others too, but she only recognised it once they had admitted this intention in themselves.

You could spend your whole life’, she said, ‘trying to trace events back to your own mistakes. People in legend thought that their misfortunes could be traced back to their failure to offer libations to certain gods.

The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight. If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.

But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also – as you say, by the same logic – something I will feel driven to provoke. If the relationship is going to end, in other words, I want to know it and confront it as soon as possible. Sometimes,’ she said, ‘this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun.

I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span.’

Suddenly this party I was enjoying, where I had felt so happy, became a torture. I was unable to laugh or smile or speak to anyone properly; I just wanted to go away and be alone,

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.

I imagined all the years passing, and us having children, and me never being able to forget the way he had shaken his head and said no when someone had asked him whether he wanted them. And him perhaps remembering that I was a person capable of invading his privacy and judging him on what I had found. This idea made me want to run away from him, from our apartment and the life we have together, to hide myself somewhere, in something unspoiled.’

As soon as you cease to be frank, you see a stain, you are forced to acknowledge imperfection, and you want only to run away and hide in shame.’

She was an adherent of the philosophy of persuasion: it sometimes did more harm than good, she said, to try to force people to recognise unpleasant truths. One had to stay close to the line of things, close but separate, like a swallow swooping over the lineaments of the landscape, describing but never landing.

You should be living, she said, not spending more time thinking about books.

they looked at me as though I were a monster. But if I had become a monster, it was Mimi, I believed, who had made me one.

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.

The longing was easy enough to understand: it was what the Greeks called nostos, a word we translated as ‘homesickness’,

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.

she remembered meeting an acquaintance in the street who had looked at her and said, there’s nothing of you any more. For a while people had kept saying things of this kind to her, telling her she was fading away, vanishing, describing her as an imminent absence.

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.