Outline

by Rachel Cusk

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.

about the woman who had attacked me, about my sense – all through the hour – of her growing resentment and anger and my increasingly certain knowledge that at some point she would strike. He listened, sombrely, as I relayed the details of her tirade, the worst aspect of which, I said, was its element of impersonality, which had caused me to feel like nothing, a non-entity, even while she was giving me, so to speak, her full attention. This feeling, of being negated at the same time as I was exposed, had had a particularly powerful effect on me, I said. It had seemed to encapsulate something that didn’t, strictly speaking, exist.

we were just now passing the promontory and temple of Sounion, from whose cliffs, in Greek legend, the father of Theseus threw himself when he saw his son’s ship returning to land wearing the black sail that conveyed, wrongly, the news of his death.

She’d startled me several times too, I said. ‘I’m a bit nervous generally,’ Anne said. ‘You can probably tell.’ She asked me how long I had been here, what the students were like and whether I had been to Athens before.

There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable.

The longing was easy enough to understand: it was what the Greeks called nostos, a word we translated as ‘homesickness’, though she had never liked that word. It seemed very English to try to pass off an emotional state as a sort of stomach bug. But that day she had realised that homesickness just about summed it up.