Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

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.

The events of that winter are familiar to everyone, and so I needn’t go over them, except to say that we felt their impact far less than most people did. We had already simplified our existence, but for others that process of simplification was brutal and agonising.

I believed, I suppose, that Justine’s concealment of herself and her embracing of the cult of plainness and comfort was the result of her shame and self-dislike, and the reason I believed it was because it was what I had always felt myself.

These periods can feel like intimations of death, until one remembers that it is the presence of the audience that allows the whole show to be put on in the first place.

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 truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.

‘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.’

I had done every kind of job in between, and lived off nerves and adrenalin, and now the greatest vice I could think of was to do nothing at all.

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.

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.

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!

I believed in the plot of life, and its assurance that all our actions will be assigned a meaning one way or another, and that things will turn out – no matter how long it takes – for the best. Quite how I had staggered along so far still holding on to this belief I didn’t know.