Outline

by Rachel Cusk

He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint.

But the only hope of finding anything is to stay exactly where you are, at the agreed place. It’s just a question of how long you can hold out.

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don’t hold on to them the sea will take them too.

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’s as if he can’t quite remember what drove him into words in the first place, all those years before, yet words are what he still deals in. I suppose it’s a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that’s never repeated. It’s the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.

And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was the more real?

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.

Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal’s fur: the deeper they’re buried the better.

That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing in our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were.

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.

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.

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.

Yet part of that feeling – the feeling of excitement that is also a rebirth of identity – has attended all his experiences of falling in love; and in the end, despite everything that has happened, these have been the most compelling moments of his life.

But it would have felt like a fake somehow, she said, a copy, to try to become those girls again, hurtling down those dirt roads, never knowing what they would find at the end of them.

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: