Outline

by Rachel Cusk

The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate.

He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.

For the second time I felt the conscious effort of his enquiry, as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp.

Instead they have grown older at a distance: when he speaks to her he imagines quite clearly the life they would have had, the life they would be sharing now. It is like walking past a house you used to live in: the fact that it still exists, so concrete, makes everything that has happened since seem somehow insubstantial.

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.

he almost thinks that to remain a writer he’d have to become one all over again, when he might just as easily become an astronaut, or a farmer. It’s as if he can’t quite remember what drove him into words in the first place,

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

But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.

He didn’t once glance back at me, for people are at their least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

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.

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.

You learn very quickly, he said, that your children are exempt only from your own judgement. If the world finds them wanting, you have to take them back.

There was no direct road between the two places, just a rambling network of country lanes that looked on the map like the tangled illustrations of veins and capillaries in a textbook, so that it made no particular difference which way you went as long as it was generally in the right direction. Yet my father had a route he preferred, because it seemed to him to be marginally more direct than the others, and so we always went the same way, crossing and recrossing the alternative roads and passing signposts to places we had either already been through or would never see, my father’s notion of the journey having established itself over time as an insurmountable reality, to the extent that it would have seemed wrong to have found ourselves passing through those unknown villages, though in fact it would have made no difference at all.

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.

how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?

They did not take any of these things personally. That was the difference between them and me, and at that time it was all the difference in the world.

I can see us there still,’ he said, ‘for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten.

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

We should accept occasionally being inconvenienced by our conveniences, he said, just as we had to tolerate flaws in our loved ones: nothing was ever perfect, he said.

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.

‘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.

That is always a dangerous moment, he said, to make a big decision, when you are not sure of what you deserve.

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.

She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language: in English she was by and large a humorous person, but in Spanish for instance – which at one time she had spoken quite well – she was not. So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew: it was an interesting thought.

For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives. But for her, coming back out into the world again, the lines were still sharp, the expectations undimmed: sometimes she felt as if she’d arrived at a party just as everyone else was leaving, leaving to go home together and sleep.