a formative experience of powerlessness

from transit by rachel cusk

"he had felt for the first time that he was at home: the feeling of having unwittingly caused an irreversible change, of his failure being the force that broke new ground, was, he realised standing there, the deepest and most familiar thing he knew. by failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross; usually, he said, because he was shoved across it as a consequence of the events that had brought him there."

"i said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. it wasn't, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities. i was well aware, i said, that gerard had constituted one such reality at the time those events had occurred. his feelings had to be ridden roughshod over; the story couldn't be constructed otherwise. yet now, i said, when i thought about that time, these discarded elements - everything that had been denied or wilfully forgotten in the service of that narrative - were what increasingly predominated. like the objects i had left in his flat, these discarded things had changed their meanings over the years, and not always in a way that was easy to accept. my own indifference to gerard's suffering, for example, which at the time i had barely considered, had come to seem increasingly criminal to me. the things that i had jettisoned in my pursuit of a new future, now that that future had itself been jettisoned, retained a growing power of accusation, to the extent that i had come to fear that i was being punished in direct proportion to something i hadn't even managed to assess or enumerate. perhaps, i said, it is never clear what should be saved and what destroyed."

"sometimes he almost wished he had never shown her a violin in the first place, which goes to show, he said, that we examine least what has formed us the most, and instead find ourselves driven blindly to re-enact it. maybe it's only in our injuries, he said, that the future can take root."

"at first, his mother accused him of making it all up. and part of him almost believed her: the problem with being honest, he said, is that you're slow to realise that other people can lie."

"when he wrote his book, he said, what he desired was to express himself in a way that was free of shame. one source of that shame was other people's knowledge of him: yet what they knew was not the truth. the truth, he realised, was something he assiduously hid from others. when he wrote his book it was this desire to be free of shame that drove him on. he wrote it in the belief that he was addressing someone who didn't know him at all, and who therefore he didn't have to be embarrassed in front of. that person was effectively himself."

"when i went back to the sitting room i was struck by the sight of jane's jewel-coloured clothing amid the white landscape of dust sheets. she had remained very still, her knees together and her head erect, her pale fingers evenly splayed around the teacup. i found myself wondering who exactly she was: there was a sense of drama about her that seemed to invite only two responses - either to become absorbed or to walk away. yet the prospect of absorption seemed somehow arduous: i recalled her remarks about the draining nature of students and thought how often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed in others."

"what she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. in the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative flights, no plot developments, no immersive human dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time."

"it was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist's vision, i said. like love, i said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again."

"i had been thinking lately about evil, i went on, and was beginning to realise that it was not a product of will but of its opposite, of surrender. it represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire."

"that idea - of one's own life as something that had already been dictated - was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy. yet the illusion of meaning recurred, much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, i said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerlessness. for a long time, i said, i believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. but my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though i had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. i had started to become, in effect, angry. i had started to desire power, because what i now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what i called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

he was watching me while i spoke, with strange-coloured eyes that reminded me of peat or earth and that now seemed strangely naked, as though by removing his glasses he had also removed the shield of adulthood. i saw that there were plates of food on the table, though i couldn't remember the waiter bringing them. he was struck, he said, by my allusion to anger: it was a biblical word and carried connotations of righteousness, but he had always believed anger to be the most mysterious and dangerous of human qualities, precisely because it had no fixed moral identity."