Outline

by Rachel Cusk

‘Money is a country all its own,

believe that this principle of growth was exponential; that life was only expansive,

For a few weeks he lived in a state of pure illusion which was really numbness, like the numbness that follows an injury, before pain starts to make its way through it, slowly but relentlessly finding a path through the dense analgesic fog.

the loss of belief

‘I wanted more affection.

said every woman in marriage

Gradually, he said, this gap, this distance between how things were and how I wanted them to be, began to undermine me.

the truth was being sacrificed to the narrator’s desire to win.

home is where when you have to go there they have to take you in,

which was the feeling that no one really came from anywhere.

It made you a better writer, did it not, not having an identity to fall back on: you saw the world with less troubled eyes.

And he was more Irish in America than he’d ever been at home.

There’s a business aspect to running a household. It’s best if everyone’s honest right at the start about what they’re going to need, to be able to stay in it.

he could accept his own defeat at the hands of such an adversary.

people are at their least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

felt good to swim, after the tension of sitting still, of the heat of Athens and of spending time with strangers. The water was so clear and still and cool, and the shapes of the coastline so soft and ancient, with the little island nearby that seemed to belong to nobody.

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. In

was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own.

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

had the sense of everything in my life having become atomised, all its elements separated as though an explosion had sent them flying away from the centre in different directions.

At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness.

he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering.

The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

It marked some difference between him and me, in that he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it.

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 thought there was nothing, having lived my whole life in this tragic country, about which I could any longer deceive myself, but as you have so unhappily pointed out, it is the very thing you don’t see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you. And how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer

Most of all she feels angry with her husband, for putting her in this position, for causing her to lose her passion in the first place and leaving her entirely responsible for the consequences.

but this sense of life as a progression is something I want no more of.

make our peace with one another then,

believe we might have learned truly to love one another and to love ourselves. But instead we saw it as another opportunity for progress, saw the journey unfolding once more, only this time it was a journey through destruction and war, for which both of us demonstrated just as much energy and aptitude as always.

I was so happy as a child,

The world that happiness existed in has completely disappeared, not just in my own life but in Greece as a whole, for whether it knows it or not Greece is a country that is on its knees and dying a slow and agonising death.

I sometimes wonder whether it was the very happiness of my childhood that has meant I have had to be taught how to suffer. I seem to have been exceptionally slow to understand where pain comes from, and how it comes. It has taken me a long time to learn to avoid it.

I replied that I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or

indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person.

she used to be desperate for us to leave the house for school, but that once we’d gone she had no idea what to do with herself and wished that we would come back.

But they have a seriousness I envied, as though they had not been distracted, were never distracted from the reality of their own lives.

‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,

‘the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute,

and which no woman’s ought to be...

the collective exhaustion of these women, which they refused to feel themselves and so had passed on to me.

honestly it is because she feels excluded or disbarred from the concept of womanhood the shoes represent.

Yet moving geographically away from this scene of loss felt unbearable, just as sometimes,

people cannot bear to go away from the place where a loved one has died.

When I think back to the time before, and especially to the years of my marriage, 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.

‘for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten.

Yet there is no particular story attached to them,

There was no romance in it, no place that was covered up and that you weren’t allowed to see.

Salome holding the severed head of John the Baptist,

indeed a different kind of life, one that was based on principles he had never paid any heed to: decency, equality, virtue, honour, self-sacrifice, as well as thrift of course.

virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.

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.