Outline Cusk Quotes

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.

As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even 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.

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.

The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.

You could spend your whole life’, she said, ‘trying to trace events back to your own mistakes.

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

That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

Music,' she said, in a languorous and dreamlike manner. 'Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.

And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?

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.

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.

Yet I still, he said, believe in love. Love restores almost everything, and where it can’t restore, it takes away the pain.

I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.

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.

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.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: 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. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting;

The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight.

Writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.

we’ve become convinced that if we say even a word out of place we’ve marked them forever, but of course that is ridiculous, and in any case, why should their lives be perfect? It is our own idea of perfection that plagues us, and it is rooted in our own desires.

That is always a dangerous moment, he said, to make a big decision, when you are not sure of what you deserve. Evidently his friends shared his opinion, because all of them urged him, without hesitation, to take it. It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. 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.

I probably didn’t share his feelings – he hoped, really, that I didn’t – but he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

I would like to be a D.H. Lawrence character, living in one of his novels. The people I meet don’t even seem to have characters. And life seems so rich, when I look at it through his eyes, yet my own life very often appears sterile, like a bad patch of earth, as if nothing will grow there however hard I try.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to be convince yourself of.

If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes.

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. She herself, she said, was quite willing to use others too, but she only recognised it once they had admitted this intention in themselves.

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.

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

while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank

...when my sons were the ages of those two leaping boys, they were so intimate it would have been hard to disentangle their separate natures. They used to play together without pause from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning to the moment they closed them again. 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. In other words, it was nobody's fault; but all the same 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.

But in a way it's like looking at old photographs of yourself. There comes a point at which the record needs to be updated, because you've shed too many links with what you were. He doesn't quite know how it happened; all he knows is that he doesn't recognize himself in those stories any more, though he remembers the bursting feeling of writing them, something in himself massing and pushing irresistibly to be born. He hasn't had that feeling since; he almost thinks that to remain a writer he'd have to become one all over again, when he might just easily become an astronaut, or a farmer. It's as if he can't quite remember what drove him into words in the first place, all those years before, yet words are what he still deals in. 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.

All the same, it seemed to him now that that life had been lived almost unconsciously, that he had been lost in it, absorbed in it, as you can be absorbed in a book, believing in its events and living entirely through and with its characters. Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; 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.

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

I said that, on the contrary, 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.

Evlilik, başka şeylerin yanında, bir inanç sistemidir, bir öyküdür de ve kendini son derece gerçek şeylerde göstermesine rağmen, yürümesini sağlayan şey eninde sonunda gizemlidir.

The parts of life that are suffocating’, Angeliki said, ‘are so often the parts that are the projection of our parents’ own desires

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.

He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.

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 that 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.

All the same, it seemed to him now that that life had been lived almost unconsciously, that he had been lost in it, absorbed in it, as you can be absorbed in a book, believing in its events and living entirely through and with its characters. Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; 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, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked. ‘More – life,’ he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. ‘And more affection,’ he added, after a pause. ‘I wanted more affection.

This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

My neighbour turned to me again, and asked me what work it was that was taking me to Athens. For the second time I felt the conscious effort of his enquiry, as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp. I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. 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.

But his own mother had once said to him, in the period after his first marriage had ended when he was deeply concerned about the effect the divorce was having on the children, that family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn’t divorce it would be something else, she said. There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, 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. I 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. But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful

mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted.

At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind.

Aslında, hayran kaldığım bir şey okuduğumda, ondan söz etmekten gitgide daha az hoşlandığımı fark etmiştim. (...) Artık hiç kimseyi hiçbir şeye ikna etmek istemiyordum.

I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.

It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.

A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn’t buy your way into it.

Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal's fur: the deeper they're buried the better.

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.

it is the very thing you don’t see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you. And how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?

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.

Sometimes, I said, the loss of transition became the gain of simplicity.

And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,’ she said, ‘you would find out.

you had said those things to him, you understand, you would have heard some truths in return. If you had been frank you would have elicited frankness.

This feeling, of being negated at the same time as I was exposed, had had a particularly powerful effect on me, I said.

There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain.

And if there's one thing I know it's that writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.

Life is sending you in one direction and you're pulling away in another, like you're disagreeing with your own destiny, like who you are is in disagreement with who they say you are.

The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality.

But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also – as you say, by the same logic – something I will feel driven to provoke.

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.

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.

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.

The polarisation of man and woman was a structure, a form: she had only felt it once it was gone, and it almost seemed as though the collapse of that structure, that equipoise, was responsible for the extremity that followed

She herself, she said, had visited the very depths of disillusionment in the male character by being honest in precisely this way: men who had claimed one minute to be dying of love for her were openly insulting her the next,

The problem is, they said, he has no fear. But it seems to me that exactly the reverse is true: 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.

In other words, it was nobody’s fault; but all the same 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.

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.

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.

no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement

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, and you want only to run away and hide in shame.

In his marriage, he now realised, the principle of progress was always at work, in the acquiring of houses, possessions, cars, the drive towards higher social status, more travel, a wider circle of friends, even the production of children felt like an obligatory calling-point on the mad journey; and it was inevitable, he now saw, that once there were no more things to add or improve on, no more goals to achieve or stages to pass through, the journey would seem to have run its course, and he and his wife would be beset by a great sense of futility and by the feeling of some malady, which was really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, but which to both of them signified that they were no longer in love.

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 looking around himself in early middle age my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living. Everywhere he looked he saw people as it were ruined by the extremity of their own experiences, and his new parents-in-law appeared to be a case in point.

Tüm yazarlar ilgi meraklısıdır. Aslında biz çocukken kimse bizi yeterince önemsememiş, biz de şimdi onlara bunun bedelini ödetiyoruz. Yaptığı işlerdeki çocuksu intikam unsurunu reddeden yazar ona göre yalancıydı. Yazı yazmak yalnızca adaleti kendi ellerinize almanın bir yoluydu.

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

I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: 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. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting; we could no longer be found at the usual number, the usual address.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. I could swim out into the sea as far as I liked, if what I wanted was to drown. Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it, despite having proved that everything about it was illusory.

At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness.

At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.

It was never said of history, for instance, that it shouldn’t be talked about; on the contrary, in terms of history silence was forgetting, and it was the thing people feared most of all when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten. And history, really, was invisible, though its monuments still stood. The making of the monuments was half of it, but the rest was interpretation. Yet there was something worse than forgetting, which was misrepresentation, bias, the selective presentation of events. The truth had to be represented: it couldn’t just be left to represent itself, as for instance she had left it to the police after the incident, and found herself more or less sidelined.

She was particularly jealous of the eldest, a boy, whose every movement she criticized. She watched him with an obsessiveness that was quite extraordinary to behold, and she was always putting him to work around the house, blaming him for the smallest evidence of disorder and insisting on her right to punish him for what she alone thought of as misdemeanor.

Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her. I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.

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. I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.

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 looking around himself in early middle age my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living.

It was nearly thirty years since his first marriage ended, and the further he got from that life, the more real it became to him. Or not real exactly, he said – what had happened since had been real enough. The word he was looking for was authentic: his first marriage had been authentic in a way that nothing ever had again. The older he got, the more it represented to him a kind of home, a place to which he yearned to return.

Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file. Ann Williams turns a page. Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound. David Cusk turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages of two separate files at the same time. Ken Wax turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Chris Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ann Williams sniffs slightly and turns a page. Meredith Rand does something to a cuticle. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Kenneth ‘Type of Thing’ Hindle detaches a Memo 402-C(1) from a file. ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie looks up briefly while turning a page. David Cusk turns a page. A yawn proceeds across one Chalk’s row by unconscious influence. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Rotes Group Room 2 hushed and brightly lit, half a football field in length. Howard Cardwell shifts slightly in his chair and turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. traces his jaw’s outline with his ring finger. Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page. Jay Landauer and Ann Williams turn a page almost precisely in sync although they are in different rows and cannot see each other. Boris Kratz bobs with a slight Hassidic motion as he crosschecks a page with a column of figures. Ken Wax turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Ambient room temperature 80° F. Sandra Pounder makes a minute adjustment to a file so that the page she is looking at is at a slightly different angle to her. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Each Tingle’s two-tiered hemisphere of boxes. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Six wigglers per Chalk, four Chalks per Team, six Teams per group. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Plus administration and support. Bob McKenzie turns a page. Anand Singh turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Ken Wax turns a page. Chris ‘The Maestro’ Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Boris Kratz turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages. Anand Singh turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown uncrosses his legs and turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. The slow squeak of the cart boy’s cart at the back of the room. Ken Wax places a file on top of the stack in the Cart-Out box to his upper right. Jay Landauer turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page and then folds over the page of a computer printout that’s lined up next to the original file he just turned a page of. Ken Wax turns a page. Bob Mc-Kenzie turns a page. Ellis Ross turns a page. Joe ‘The Bastard’ Biron-Maint turns a page. Ed Shackleford opens a drawer and takes a moment to select just the right paperclip. Olive Borden turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Paul Howe turns a page and then sniffs circumspectly at the green rubber sock on his pinkie’s tip. Olive Borden turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Devils are actually angels. Elpidia Carter and Harriet Candelaria reach up to their Cart-In boxes at exactly the same time. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. ‘Type of Thing’ Ken Hindle looks up a routing code. Some with their chin in their hand. Robert Atkins turns a page even as he’s crosschecking something on that page. Ann Williams turns a page. Ed Shackleford searches a file for a supporting document. Joe Biron-Maint turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page.

The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free.

Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; 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, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked. “More life” - he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. “And more affection” he added, after a pause. “I wanted more affection.

I began to feel for the first time that I was seeing what was really there, without asking myself whether or not I was expecting to see it. When I think back to the time before, and especially to the years of my marriage, it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion. We never, I think, discovered the true nature of the things we saw, any more than we were ever in danger of being affected by them; we peered at them, at people and places, like people on a ship peer at the passing mainland, and should we have seen them in any kind of trouble, or they us, there would have been nothing whatever either one of us could have done about it.

It's true,' Elena said, 'that my own need for provocation is something other people seem to find very difficult to understand. Yet to me it has always made perfect sense. But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also - as you say, by the same logic - something I will feel driven to provoke. 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.

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, obliterated!