Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

I don’t think I realised how many parts of life there were, until each one of them began to release its capacity for badness.

But it was not my own country: I was only passing through, going back to a home I thought of with secret dread,

It’s so easy to think you don’t matter all that much at the very moment when your moral duty as a self is most exposed.

I’ve often thought that there are certain characters who can’t or won’t learn the lesson of life, and that they live among us as either a nuisance or a gift.

It seemed to me that all this beauty was no good if it had no immunity: if I could harm it, then anyone could.

Doubtless someone else is walking beside that same stretch of river at this minute, likewise committing the sin of believing that things happen for a reason, and that that reason is herself!

At that time of year – the spring – the potatoes we store in the shed start to sprout, even though we keep them in complete darkness. They throw out these white fleshy arms because they know it’s spring, and sometimes I’ll look at one and realise a potato knows more than most people do.

The sight of other people getting what they want, jostling and demanding things, makes me decide I would rather go without.

I’ve always known I would be the first to be trampled underfoot in a crisis,

I felt myself falling out of the frame I had lived in for years, the frame of human implication in a particular set of circumstances. From that moment, I ceased to be immersed in the story of my own life and became distinct from it.

I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state, which had never truly been revealed to me before.

Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment,

I have been troubled by them right from the beginning, when Justine arrived on this earth and seemed to want to stand in the same spot that I stood in, only I was there first.

I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t!

for me there is a healthy kind of talking, though it’s rare – the kind of talking through which people create themselves by giving themselves utterance.

This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it.

believe that as a rule children don’t care for their parents’ truths and have long since made up their own minds, or have formulated false beliefs from which they can never be persuaded, since their whole conception of reality is founded on them.

When Justine was younger there had been a feeling of malleability, of active process, in our relations, but now that she was a young woman it was as though time had abruptly run out and we were frozen in the positions we had happened to assume in the moment of its stopping, like the game where everyone has to creep up behind the leader and then freeze the second he turns around.

I feared, suddenly, that my belief in the life I was living wouldn’t hold, and that all I’d built up would collapse underneath me and I’d be unhappy again – I didn’t know, in that moment, how I was going to manage.

L’s fame came strongly at the beginning of his career, when he was only in his twenties. After that, it must have felt as though he’d been given some heavy object he had to carry around for the rest of his life. Such things distort the flow of experience and misshape the personality.

he had watched the people of his acquaintance create homes that were like plaster casts of their own wealth, with humans inside. Those structures sometimes exploded and sometimes merely suffocated their occupants

He knew plenty of gluttons for living who gained and lost and gained again and lost again in such quick succession that they probably never even noticed that none of it lasted;

So much of power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you.

To be led and then discarded by one’s urges: why should an artist not feel it more than anyone?

Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.

While I went on with the preparations I imagined being a different kind of person, someone careless and selfish who was confident that those same qualities would produce a successful evening. How I wished, sometimes, to be that person!

It was as though, in those moments, his terrible objectivity became my own and I saw things the way they really are.

he filled one with the dreadful suspicion that there is no story to life, no personal meaning beyond the meaning of any given moment.

There was a greater reality, I believed, beyond or behind or beneath the reality I knew, and it seemed to me that a lifelong pain would be ended if only I could break through to it.

There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

Oh, why was living so painful, and why were we given these moments of health, if only to realise how burdened with pain we were the rest of the time?

I was beset by waves of conflicting emotion, chief among them a nameless kind of sorrow, for the people Tony and I had been then, as if those people no longer existed.

The thing is, Jeffers, that between two people as different as Tony and me there needs to be an act almost of translation, and at times of crisis it’s very easy for something to get lost in that act.

A kind of forgetting – a betrayal of the truth of memory – would have been enacted, and this is perhaps how we become artificial in our own lives, Jeffers, by our incessant habit of deliberate forgetting.

Tony accepted reality and saw his place in it as something he was responsible for: L objected to reality and was always trying to free himself from its strictures, which meant that he believed himself responsible for nothing.

If we treated each moment as though it were a permanent condition, a place where we might find ourselves compelled to remain forever, how differently most of us would choose the things that moment contains!

Her father was a famous golfer – even I had heard of him, Jeffers – and very rich, and the one thing Brett had never learned to do was play golf, because her father had never taught her. So it goes, among our species!

If only something could tell us in advance which parts of life to pay attention to! We

it seemed to me there was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself. To realise this is to bid a last and lonely farewell to dreams.

Might it be true that half of freedom is the willingness to take it when it’s offered?