Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves.

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. If I’d stood up to him, perhaps all the things that happened afterwards wouldn’t have occurred. But for once I thought, let someone else do it! And that is how we lose control over our own destinies.

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!

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?

I have wanted to be free my whole life and I haven’t managed to liberate my smallest toe.

Meanwhile, I just sit staring straight in front of me with nothing to do. That’s all I’ve managed as far as freedom is concerned, to get rid of the people and the things I don’t like. After that, there isn’t all that much left!

I find it difficult to answer my own needs. The sight of other people getting what they want, jostling and demanding things, makes me decide I would rather go without.

I believe a lot of people walk around with this problem in their heads, and it leads to all kinds of trouble – in my case, it led to my body and my mind getting divorced from each other right at the start, when I was only a few years old.

But my point is that there’s something that paintings and other created objects can do to give you some relief.

You will be wondering, Jeffers, what the phrase was that came out of L’s paintings and spoke itself so clearly to me. It was: I am here. I won’t say what I think the words mean, or who they refer to, because that would be to try to stop them living.

Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment, mine more than anyone else’s. It’s a form of control, as so much of generosity is.

I believe a house ought first and foremost to be cosy and to allow you to forget the outside when you’re in it.

But for Tony a view has a kind of spiritual significance, not as something you describe or talk about but as something you live in correspondence with, so that it looks back at you and incorporates itself in everything you do.

I don’t want to give the impression that I thought about him more than I did. The thoughts about him – which were really about his work – were cyclical, like a consummation. They consummated my solitary self, and supplied it with a kind of continuity.

I 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.

True

Least of all did I understand what freedom was and how I could attain it. I thought it was a mere unbuttoning, a release, where in fact – as you know well – it is the dividend yielded by an unrelenting obedience to and mastery of the laws of creation. The rigorously trained fingers of the concert pianist are freer than the enslaved heart of the music lover can ever be. I suppose this explains why great artists can be such dreadful and disappointing people. Life rarely offers sufficient time or opportunity to be free in more than one way.

I don’t think parents necessarily understand all that much about their children. What you see of them is what they can’t help being or doing, rather than what they intend, and it leads to all kinds of misapprehensions.

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

As Sophocles said it – how dreadful knowledge of the truth is, when the truth can’t help you!

True love is the product of freedom, and I’m not sure a parent and child can ever have that kind of love, unless they decide to start over again as adults.

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.

I tried to defend myself, and one way or another the little structure of love we had been building together was knocked down and would have to be built all over again.

Perfectly described relationships with parents and their kids

I don’t exist to be seen by you,’ I said, ‘so don’t delude yourself on that point, because I’m the one that’s trying to free myself from how you see me.

You’d feel better if you could see what I actually am, but you can’t. Your sight is a kind of murder, and I won’t be murdered any more.’

‘It’s good to sit and watch this gentle world,’ L said. ‘We tire ourselves out so.’

How easy it is, Jeffers, to believe that of the men who conform to our idea of normality! I don’t think a woman is ever taken on trust in that way, unless it’s through the notion of her subservience.

but it was my suspicion that a woman’s madness represents the final refuge of the male secret, the place where he would destroy her rather than be revealed, and I had no intention now of being destroyed in that way

Why was it so difficult to live day after day with people and still remember that you were distinct from them and that this was your one mortal life?

What I think I represented to him was mortality, because I was a woman he couldn’t obliterate or transfigure with his own desire.

Wow

I was, in other words, his mother, the woman he had always feared would eat him and take away his form and life just as she had created it.

How often I have been made to realise it is children who teach their parents, not the other way around!

I believe there are certain moments in life that don’t obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and this was one of them:

We pay attention, for instance, when we’re falling in love, and then afterwards as often as not we realise we were deluding ourselves.

and even that scent seemed to hold a melancholy note, as though everything that had been and could ever be joyous and good lay irretrievably in the past.

‘All that has gone. So many of our feelings are illusion,’

As for me, I have been disliked all my life, since I was the tiniest child, and have learned to live with it, because the few people I myself have liked have always liked me back

So I gave up L, gave him up in my heart, and filled in the secret place inside myself that I had kept free for him all along.

But I like to think that, however unwittingly, L gave her freedom, the freedom not to look to others for the means of her survival that is still so hard for a woman to come by.

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

The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it.

True art means seeking to capture the unreal.