Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

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!

You know, Jeffers, that I am interested in the existence of things before our knowledge of them – partly because I have trouble believing that they do exist! If you have always been criticised, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist. The criticism is more real than you are: it seems, in fact, to have created you.

It’s just that sometimes I need to talk in order to feel real, and I wish you would talk to me.’ He was silent, lying on his back in the darkness and staring up at the ceiling. Then he said: ‘I feel like my heart is talking to you all the time.’

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.

The wounded don’t survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival, and how can she be subject to revelation after that?

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.’

that I was naive to expect that other people would merely allow me to change when those changes directly interfered with their own interests, and the revelation that my whole life, which appeared to have been built on love and freedom of choice, was in fact a facade that concealed the most craven selfishness was deeply shocking to me.

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 – I would sooner destroy myself, I said, if Justine was capable of understanding my reasons for doing it.

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!