Outline

by Rachel Cusk

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.

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

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. Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it, despite having proved that everything about it was illusory.

I said that I found appearances more bewildering and tormenting now than at any previous point in my life. It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions, one that I had only become aware of once it was no longer there, like a missing pane of glass in a window that allows the wind and rain to come rushing through unchecked.

though Irini had been dead for thirty years and which symbolised the enduring nature of repulsion, while beauty was seen once and never seen again.

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 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 had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. 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.

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 listened to this confession, if confession it was, in silence. I found that I was disappointed in him, and that discovery made me feel, for the first time, afraid of him.

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. But there is another explanation,’ she said, ‘which is simply that he is mad.’

Her sense of reality, in other words, had created an attack on itself, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis. ‘I prefer to call it madness,’ she said, ‘whether his or my own,

The idea that you should love your enemies is patently ridiculous. It is entirely a religious proposition. To say that you love what you hate and what hates you is the same as admitting you have been defeated, that you accept your oppression and are just trying to make yourself feel better about it. And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,’ she said, ‘you would find out.’

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 find myself thinking of the simplicity of the time before we had said one syllable to one another: that is the time I would like to go back to,’ she said, ‘the time just before we first opened our mouths to speak.’