Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

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!

It made me feel old, older than the most ancient monument, which is how children make you feel when you still presume to produce an original feeling of your own now and then.

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.

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

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.