Outline by Rachel Cusk

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Outline by Rachel Cusk was experimental. It followed the author herself through a series of vignettes with friends and strangers alike, ostensibly all unrelated, but masterfully spliced together to refract varying flavours of reality, and a mixture of emotions I find difficult to pin down. A text that feels like twilight, the sun inching further away casting shadows, and apparitions, causing you to question what you see and believe.

I really really enjoyed it.

This book was recommended by a person I met while trekking in the Himalayas earlier this year. It blows my mind how the world is so big and small at the same time.

for the first time in his life he experienced cruelty, and along with it certain new kinds of unhappiness: loneliness, homesickness, the longing for his mother and father. the waterfall of new experiences or perhaps the oneness of it

For a few weeks he lived in a state of pure illusion which was really numbness, like the numbness that follows an injury, before pain starts to make its way through it, slowly but relentlessly finding a path through the dense analgesic fog.

Like the loose stitch that causes the whole garment to unravel, it was hard to piece back this chain of events to its original flaw.

• beautiful imagery

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.

• very interesting about a child throwing a toy out of their baby stool

As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition - I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

• this feels truer as I get older, I have my thoughts but I don’t have a strong desire for making everyone else subscribe to them

in recognising his father-in-laws suffering, he began to recognise his own. It sounds trivial, yet it could almost be said that through this recognition he felt his whole life turning on its axis: the history of his self-will appeared to him, by a simple revolution in perspective, as a moral journey. He had turned around, like a climber turns around and looks back down the mountain, reviewing the path he has trav-elled, no longer immersed in the ascent. beautiful metaphor

It was with her, after all, that his identity had been forged: if she no longer recognised him, then who was he?

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don’t hold on to them the sea will take them too.

• ahhh

What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

And he was more Irish in America than he’d ever been at home.

• paradox of heritage - the further away you are, the more you realise your differences make you who you are

There comes a point at which the record needs to be updated, because you’ve shed too many links with what you were. […] I suppose it’s a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that’s never repeated. It’s the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.

writing comes out of tension, tension between what’s inside and what’s outside.

I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn’t find the time, do you?

I said that I thought most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.

It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.

Looking at. it I felt overcome with a sadness that was partly con-fusion, as though his back were a foreign country l was lost in; or not lost but exiled, in as much as the feeling of being lost was not attended by the hope that I would eventually find something I recognised. His aged back seemed to maroon us both in our separate and untransfigurable histories. It struck me that some people might think I was stupid, to go out alone on a boat with a man I didn’t know. But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. [Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and 1 had definitively left those structures.]

• when you’re in a foreign land, ‘conventional’ thoughts lose their practicality.
• The superimpositions we place over reality

Their play was a kind of shared trance in which they created whole imaginary worlds, and they were forever involved in games and projects whose planning and execution were as real to them as they were invisible to everyone else: sometimes I would move or throw away some apparently inconsequential item, only to be told that it was a sacred prop in the ongoing make-believe, a narrative which seemed to run like a magic river through our household, inexhaustible, and which they could exit and re-enter at will, moving over that threshold which no one else could see into another element. And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them - I can’t even recall which one it was - stopped believing in it.

• shared beliefs form the core parts of our experience, as soon as the gloves come off and we retire from that intersubjectivity, the structure feels free-floating.

There was no such thing as an unblemished child-hood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain. And as for divorce, even if you lived like a saint you would still experience all the same losses, however much you tried to explain them away. Could weep just to think that I’ll never see you again as you were at the age of six - I would give anything, she said, to meet that six-year-old one more time.

We children would lie on the back seat, drowsy and nauseous with the swaying motion, and sometimes I would open my eyes and see the summer landscape passing through the dusty windows, so full and ripe at that time of year that it seemed impossible it could ever be broken down and turned to winter.

I did not notice that Paniotis went away from our encounter feeling that his life had been a failure, any more than the mountain notices the climber that loses his footing and falls down one of its ravines. Sometimes it has seemed to me that Life is a series of punishments for such moments of un-awareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.

he has too much fear, so much that he is driven to enact the thing of which he is afraid, lest it should happen of its own accord.

My mother once admitted, I said, that she used to be desperate for us to leave the house for school, but that once we’d gone she had no idea what to do with herself and wished that we would come back.

• in search for our “true” self -> a quest with no answers

“For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ‘the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman’s ought to be these days. My own mother lived through me in a way that was completely uncritical,’ she said, ‘and the consequence was that I came into adulthood unprepared for life, because nobody saw me as important in the way she did, which was the way I was used to being seen. And then you meet a man who thinks you’re important enough to marry you, so it seems right that you should say yes. But it is when you have a baby that the feeling of importance really returns,’ she said, with growing passion, ‘except that one day you realise that all this – the house, the husband, the child – isn’t importance after all, in fact it is the exact opposite: you have become a slave”

“I myself,’ she continued, extending her silvered foot out from beneath the table, ‘developed a weakness for delicate shoes when we returned to Greece. Perhaps it was because I had begun to see the virtues of standing still. And for the character in my novel, shoes like these represent something forbidden. They are the sort of thing she would never wear. Moreover, when she does see women wearing such shoes, it makes her feel sad. She has believed, until now, that this was because she found such women pitiful, but in fact when she thinks about it honestly it is because she feels excluded or disbarred from the concept of womanhood the shoes represent. She feels, almost, as if she isn’t a woman at all. But if she isn’t a woman, what is she? She is experiencing a crisis of femininity that is also a creative crisis, yet she has always sought to separate the two things in the belief that they were mutually exclusive, that the one disqualified the other. She looks out of the window of her apartment at the women running in the park, always running, and she asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.”

• very insightful dichotomy that women face

1 kept waiting for the children to ask to go home; he said, but in fact it was I who wanted to go home. I began to realise, in the car, that as far as they were concerned they were home, at least partly, because they were with me.’

• AHHHH this is when the dad encountered a storm with the kids and was feeling futile with his wife’s departure. This ineptitude that confronts someone when tasked with responsibility. Rising up to it.

How cold the water was, and how incredibly deep and refreshing and clear - we drifted around and around, with the sun on our faces and our bodies hanging like three white roots beneath the water. I can see us there still, he said, ‘for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them, he said, ‘despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself […] But there was no sequel to that time in the pool, nor ever will be.

When she spoke about her relationship with her husband it was as though she were speaking about the parts of an engine, explaining how they worked or did not work. There was no romance in it, no place that was covered up and that you weren’t allowed to see.

‘It remains your truth, he said, ‘whatever has happened. Don’t be afraid to look at it’

• ❤️

It was as though the music had once belonged to her and now no longer did; as though she had been excluded from its beauty, was being forced to see it in the possession of someone else, and to revisit in its entirety her own sadness at her inability, for a number of reasons, to remain in that world.

• a girl who was an inspiring pianist but gave up that dream.

“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” in the shower that I realised he was being unfaithful to me. love is a rebellious - ironic and funny

“They were marvelling at the acoustic and visual effect of the water on the glass when, with a great groaning and creaking, the whole thing suddenly collapsed on top of them, the flaw in the glass apparently having weakened the structure to the point where it could not bear the weight of the water falling on it.’ The woman paused. ‘This,’ she said, ‘you will recall, was told to me by my sister over the telephone, a story that neither affected her nor, strictly speaking, concerned her. And since no one, amazingly, was hurt, it wasn’t a story that would shock people and that you would tell for that reason. Nor did it really affect the friend who had told it to her in the first place, except by association, because she had a panel in her ceiling of the same type. So I received it, as it were, third-hand, but it is as real to me as if I had experienced it myself. ” giving language to a strange liminal feeling of second/third hand experiences, still rippling into your life.

Perhaps, he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost.

the feeling of excitement that is also a rebirth of identity - has attended all his experiences of falling in love; and in the end, despite everything that has happened, these have been the most compelling moments of his life.

• beautiful line - the rebirth of identity that comes with falling in love.

If he could only love what he did not know, and be loved in return on that same basis, then knowledge became an inexorable disenchantment, for which the only cure was to fall in love with someone new.

• FACTS

What she couldn’t stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily.

I watched the people at the other tables and at the tables on the adjoining terraces, all packed so tightly that the whole square seemed to be aflame with conversation.

• good imagery

It seemed to me that this was a situation it was impossible to get out of, while still thinking as well of one another as we had before. I had this feeling; she continued, which I have had since and which gets worse each time we argue, that we were caught in a net of words, tangled up in all these strings and knots, and that each of us thought there was something we could say that would set us free, but the more words we spoke the more tangles and knots there were. I find myself thinking of the simplicity of the time before we had said one syllable to one another: that is the time I would like to go back to; she said, ‘the time just before we first opened our mouths to speak’

• when you get so afraid to talk because of the fear of loss

Like slaves, he said, or servants, in whose absence their masters would feel vulnerable. They watch us living; they prove that we are real; through them, we access the story of ourselves. In our interactions with them we - not they - are shown to be what we are. Surely - for human beings - the most important thing about an animal, he said, is that it can’t speak.

• witnesses to your own life

Watching him eat the food, she continued, she had experienced two feelings that seemed directly to contradict one another. The first was longing; and the second was nausea. She both wanted and didn’t want whatever it was that sight - the sight of him eating - had invoked. The longing was easy enough to understand: it was what the Greeks called nostos, a word we translated as ‘homesickness’, though she had never liked that word. It seemed very English to try to pass off an emotional state as a sort of stomach bug. But that day she had realised that homesickness just about summed it up.

For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives. But for her, coming back out into the world again, the lines were still sharp, the expectations undimmed: sometimes she felt as if she’d arrived at a party just as everyone else was leaving, leaving to go home together and sleep.

• fascinating the metamorphosis of the body

Created by Apurva Shukla.

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