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.

But for once I thought, let someone else do it! And that is how we lose control over our own destinies.

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

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.

When people marry young, Jeffers, everything grows out of the shared root of their youth and it becomes impossible to tell which part is you and which the other person. So if you attempt to sever yourselves from one another it becomes a severance all the way from the roots to the furthest ends of the branches, a gory mess of a process that seems to leave you half of what you were before.

a great misgiving went through me, the way lightning can pierce all the way through a tree from top to bottom and hollow out its core.

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.

we can consider our job as parents to have been accomplished without fatal error or wrongdoing when the small child becomes visible once more in the fully grown being.

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

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’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself.

It’s so hard to say how people appear, once you’ve come to know them – far easier to say what it’s like to be near them!

does the purpose of art extend to the artist himself as a living being?

It had a good-sized desk that faced away from the window – I believed most writers agreed, I said, that it was better not to have anything to look at.

however wicked and terrible an artist permits himself to become on the human scale, somewhere inside him there is a part that remains capable of pity – or rather, when that part is gone, so is his art.

The truest test of a person is the test of compassion.

art – not just L’s art but the whole notion of art – might itself be a serpent, whispering in our ears, sapping away all our satisfaction and our belief in the things of this world with the idea that there was something higher and better within us which could never be equalled by what was right in front of us.

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: I am living it still,

the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later.

I stood there for a long time, not wanting to disturb him with any clumsy noise or movement, and then I very quietly went away, feeling that I had witnessed something in the way of a sacrament, the sort of sacrament that only occurs in nature, when an organism – be it the smallest flower or the largest beast – silently and unobserved confirms its own being.

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.