Outline

by Rachel Cusk

for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they would exact their innocence from you at any price.

to offer him an anonymity that might also constitute a re-evaluation of his whole persona, he who was known so thoroughly and yet so limitingly by his wife and before that by his parents, his siblings, his uncles and aunts.

in return on that same basis, then knowledge became an inexorable disenchantment, for which the only cure was to fall in love with someone new.

I had thought the differences between us were obvious, but to him they weren

was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily.

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.

The idea that you should love your enemies is patently ridiculous.

It was only when you got beyond people’s fantasies, Elena continued, about themselves and one another, that you accessed a level of reality where things assumed their true value and were what they seemed to be.

man in possession of his own morality and attitudes,

something we could say that would set us free, but the more words we spoke the more tangles and knots there were.

about disgust, the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women and that you are always trying to purge with what you call frankness.

people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them.

Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention.

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

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.

She used to be married, she said, to a man who was a very good cook and who possessed generally an almost fanatical sense of order around food. The

she now lacked the necessary sense of entitlement, in that she felt she had no right to be in such places any more.

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

she still regarded them as being bound in some indissoluble sense.

Yet it was immediately apparent, when she spoke to him on the phone that day, that he did not share her view. He was polite, distant and curt while she

The polarisation of man and woman was a structure, a form: she had only felt it once it was gone, and it almost seemed as though the collapse of that structure, that equipoise, was responsible for the extremity

one of which was a crisis of identity. She didn’t know, in other words, quite who it had happened to. This

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 not one word of it would stick.

battle of wills, his discipline against my emotion, with only the armrest between us.

He sealed himself in his own view of life, even at the risk of causing offence, because he knew that view to be under threat.

Agora, and look at the headless statues of goddesses in the colonnade.