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.

This isn’t out of laziness, but rather the feeling that my life has entailed too many practical tasks, so that if I add even one more to the total, the balance will be tipped and I will have to admit I have failed to live as I have always wished to. The trouble lay in finding anything to put on the other side of the scales: I was quite capable, as I have said, of spending all my free time just sitting and staring in front of me. And yet the second anyone asked me to go and do something, I immediately felt oppressed!

‘I’ve often thought it’s fathers who make painters,’ he said, ‘while writers come from their mothers.’ I asked him why he thought that. ‘Mothers are such liars,’ he said. ‘Language is all they have. They fill you up with language if you let them.’

‘You always try to force things,’ he said. ‘It’s as if you think nothing would ever happen, unless you made it.’ ‘I believe nothing would,’ I said.

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.