Outline

by Rachel Cusk

among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.

They were both still young enough to believe that this principle of growth was exponential; that life was only expansive, and

sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

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.

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. My

came away with the impression that these writers he had worshipped as the artists of our time were in fact cold and unempathetic people devoted to self-promotion and above all else, to money.

And so I learned, he said, that it is impossible to improve things, and that good people are just as responsible for it as bad, and that improvement itself is perhaps a mere personal fantasy, as lonely in its way as Angeliki’s lonely place.

‘The parts of life that are suffocating’, Angeliki said, ‘are so often the parts that are the projection of our parents’ own desires.

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 there was something worse than forgetting, which was misrepresentation, bias, the selective presentation of events. The truth had to be represented: it couldn’t just be left to represent itself, as for instance she had left it to the police after the incident, and found herself more or less sidelined.