"Outline"

[fiefoe]

Reading this Rachel Cusk novel is like watching a French movie from the 70s. People just talk -- the 'I' gets chunks of good comebacks, but largely the book is composed of many slightly confessional stories people (mostly firmly middled-aged) tell to her. There's almost no plot to speak of but plenty of insights. One feels like a voyeur afterwards.
(Book blurb says "It... investigates people's motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly.", but that point seems too obvious.)

• She led us through the possibility of death and disaster, as the priest leads the congregation through the details of purgatory and hell; and no one jumped up to escape while there was still time. Instead we listened or half-listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been bestowed on us by this coupling of formality with doom.
• he raised his eyebrows, which were silver and grew unexpectedly coarsely and wildly from his forehead, like grasses in a rocky place. It was this eccentricity that had made me answer him. The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate.
• He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint.
• among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.
• never again had he been able to believe in that way. Perhaps it was that – the loss of belief – that constituted his yearning for the old life. Whatever it was, he and his wife had built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this – he now saw – was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness
• in this way, in recognising his father-in-law’s 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.
• the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but ...my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living.
• Yet the life without limitations has been exhausting, has been one long history of actual and emotional expense, like thirty years of living in one hotel after another. It is the feeling of impermanence, of homelessness, that has cost him.
• Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative, but in this story the two poles had become dissociated and ascribed separate, warring identities... The one exception was the narrator’s love for his boring, tornado-swept parents-in-law, a bittersweet detail in which positive and negative regained their balance.
• 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.
• the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and it occurred to me that in Clelia’s mind they perhaps represented the same thing, a sort of objectivity that arose when the focus became the sum of human parts and the individual was blotted out. It was, perhaps, a form of discipline, almost of asceticism, a temporary banishing of the self and its utterances –
• The drawers in the antique oriental bureau in the sitting room were empty and smelled of dust. I kept looking for something else, a clue, something rotting or breeding, a layer of mystery or chaos or shame, but I didn’t find it.
• The material reality of my neighbour, which up there had seemed so light, was concretised down here, and the result was that he seemed more of a stranger, as though context were also a kind of imprisonment.
• But it was true that he hadn’t seen his daughter for several years, as she hadn’t returned to Greece. It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.
• He had removed his shirt, and his bare back faced me while he drove. It was very broad and fleshy, leathery with sun and age, and marked with numerous moles and scars and outcrops of coarse grey hair. Looking at it I felt overcome with a sadness that was partly confusion, as though his back were a foreign country I 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 I had definitively left those structures.
• He didn’t once glance back at me, for people are at their least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
• I said that I found appearances more bewildering and tormenting now than at any previous point in my life. It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions, one that I had only become aware of once it was no longer there, like a missing pane of glass in a window that allows the wind and rain to come rushing through unchecked...  And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own... And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was the more real?
• He climbed over the edge and descended into the tomb and there, sure enough, he saw his parents’ two coffins with the grandfather between them. It was not so hard to slide them into their proper positions, but once he’d done it he realised that owing to the steepness and depth of the tomb it was going to be impossible for him to get out again.
• 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... it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist. <> I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living.
• What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy: it was as though everything that had been inside was moved outside, piece by piece, like furniture being taken out of a house and put on the pavement... Their antagonism was in exact proportion to their former harmony, but where the harmony had been timeless and weightless, the antagonism occupied space and time. The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public:... If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse. And what is astonishing is how much detail it gathers to itself, so that nothing remains untouched by it.
• I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.
• Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, 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. While I spoke Paniotis looked more and more aghast. That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could have come up with, he said.
• In my experience painters are far less conventional than writers. Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal’s fur: the deeper they’re buried the better.
• I replied that I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person.
• Angeliki’s face had a softness, almost a mistiness, that was attractive while also being the reason for its careworn appearance. It seemed that anything could leave an impression in that softness.
• Their shoes were the only inelegant thing about them,’ she said, ‘yet I felt they were the key to the whole mystery of their nature, for they were the shoes of a woman without vanity.
• 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.
• with a demolished beauty she bore quite regally. The bones of her face were so impressively structured as to verge on the grotesque,
• I marvelled at the sheer genius of the man, who had also managed, while I was there, to exact my forgiveness as stealthily as a pickpocket removes your wallet, and was returning me to the street lighter, though poorer, with that quill of blue perched in my thoughts like a feather in a beggar’s cap.’
• perhaps,’ he said, ‘the best way to confront our fears is to put them in costume, so to speak; to translate them, for the simple act of translation very often renders things harmless.
• His third wife, he said, had been so puritanical that he sometimes felt no amount of pit-stops and pauses would make up for the years he spent with her, in which every event was faced head-on, unanaesthetised, and every little pleasure interrogated and either deemed unnecessary or else written down – with tax added on, he said – in a notebook she kept with her at all times for the purpose. Never had he met someone who was so unmediatedly the product of their family, a Calvinist household
• I regard love – the love between man and woman – as the great regenerator of happiness, but it is also the regenerator of interest. It is what you perhaps would call the storyline – he smiled – and so, he said, for all the virtues of my third wife, I discovered that a life with no story was not, in the end, a life that I could live.
• the strange transitions from enchantment to disenchantment and back again that moved through human affairs like cloudbanks, sometimes portentous and grey and sometimes mere distant inscrutable shapes that blotted out the sun for a while
• I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying – it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become – to put it bluntly – anathema to me.
• no one’, he said, ‘could say that she was wrong for simply waking me from a nap, even though there was no reason to wake me and I would have slept on for hours. Yet I believe, as I say, that it was precisely this underhand act that gave birth to her vitriol, for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they would exact their innocence from you at any price.’
• Yet part of that feeling – 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. <> I said I wondered how he could fail to see the relationship between disillusionment and knowledge in what he had told me. 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.
• He hadn’t realised how many English meanings came from Greek compounds. For instance the word ellipsis, he’d been told, could literally be translated as ‘to hide behind silence’.
• If the relationship is going to end, in other words, I want to know it and confront it as soon as possible. Sometimes,’ she said, ‘this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun. Very often I have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span.’
• your story about Konstantin is really a story about disgust, the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women and that you are always trying to purge with what you call frankness. As soon as you cease to be frank, you see a stain, you are forced to acknowledge imperfection,
• She was an adherent of the philosophy of persuasion: it sometimes did more harm than good, she said, to try to force people to recognise unpleasant truths. One had to stay close to the line of things, close but separate, like a swallow swooping over the lineaments of the landscape, describing but never landing.
• In my sister’s company I am always a little distracted from my own purpose; I have a sense that I need to perform things for her, to present them to her, to show her my life rather than let her see it naturally, as it really is.
• I was suddenly filled with the most extraordinary sense of existence as a secret pain, an inner torment it was impossible to share with others, who asked you to attend to them while remaining oblivious to what was inside you, like the mermaid in the fairy story who walks on knives that no one else can see.
• ‘He is now a cold and calculating man, concerned only with what he can get out of life. I myself put my trust in cats,’ she said, ‘who at least can settle the question of their own survival, and while they might lack the capacity for power and influence, and might be said to subsist on jealousies and a degree of selfishness, also possess uncanny instincts and a marked excellence in matters of taste.
• And so,’ she said in conclusion, ‘my lover has learned to put his books away; and no longer does he bake or open the piano, and for this mixed blessing that is the shrinkage of his persona I have the cats – if not perhaps also my husband – to thank.’
• he spoke it with a strong Scottish accent: he had spent ten years driving a cab in Aberdeen, and had once given a ride to the writer lain Banks, who had, so he said, been very encouraging. She’d tried to explain that she was a playwright, but then he’d said she was getting too technical.
• it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal,... So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew:
• even the masters, the works she had always revered, allowed themselves by and large to be summed up. Even Beckett, her god, had been destroyed by meaninglessness. She would feel the word start to rise, and she would try to hold it down but it kept coming, rising and rising until it had popped irreversibly into her head. And not just books either, it was starting to happen with people – she was having a drink with a friend the other night and she looked across the table and thought, friend, with the result that she strongly suspected their friendship was over.
• “If people were silent about the things that had happened to them, was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them?”