Second Place by Rachel Cusk (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

the way the question of male and female felt somehow theoretical in his presence, I suppose because he made his disregard for convention so apparent. He undermined, in other words, one’s automatic ideas about what men and women are.

He was very small and neatly made and not at all physically imposing, yet there was always the sense that he could burst out at any minute in some violent physical act – a feeling of impulses under continual restraint. He had a careful way of moving, as though he had been injured in the past, but in fact I think this was just the way age had come to him, perhaps because he had thought he would be young forever. And he did still seem youthful, partly because his features were so finely drawn, especially the dark brows arching markedly over the very wide-open eyes that were filled with the light I have described. His nose was small and aristocratic-looking: the nose of a snob. He had quite a sweet, small mouth with full lips. There was something Mediterranean in his appearance – a quality, as I have said, of sharp drawing. He was always very clean and groomed, not at all how one imagines an artist to be. By contrast his painting apron was the grisliest garment, caked with gore like a butcher’s smock. I noticed for the first time that the fingers on his left hand were slightly deformed – they were crooked, and flattened at the tips.

‘An accident in childhood,’ he said, seeing me look at them.

Yes, he was an attractive man, though somehow illegible to me: he emanated a kind of physical neutrality that I took personally and interpreted as a sign that he did not consider me to be truly a woman. As I have said before, he made me feel acutely unattractive, and I admit I had dressed that day with care, anticipating that I might see him. Yet he was so diminutive and self-contained, not at all the sort of man I myself might be physically drawn to – I could have defended my vanity if I’d wanted to! Instead I succumbed to a feeling of abjection, within which there was an illogical sense of hope. I wanted him to be more than he was, or to be myself somehow less than I was, and because I wanted those things my will was aroused – in any case, there was the feeling of some unknown lying between us that awoke a dangerous part of me, the part that felt that I hadn’t truly lived. It was this same part – or an aspect of it – that had drawn me to Tony, who likewise I hadn’t entirely recognised at first or imagined myself attracted to. Tony also awoke me, but to the presence in myself of a fixed male image, to which he did not correspond. To see him, I had to use a faculty that I did not entirely trust. All my life this image, I came to realise, had in various forms caused me to recognise certain people and to consider them real, while others remained unnoticed or two-dimensional. I understood that I should no longer trust it, and the mechanism of not trusting and not believing and then being rewarded for it came over time to supplant my actual trust and belief: this, I think, more than Tony himself and more than the geographical distance from my previous life, formed a great part of the gulf separating me from the person I had been.

I have often wondered, Jeffers, whether true artists are people who have succeeded in discarding or marginalising their inner reality quite early on, which might explain how someone can know so much about life with one side of themselves, while understanding nothing about it at all with another. After I met Tony, and learned to override my own concept of reality, I became aware of how widely and indiscriminately I was capable of imagining things, and how coldly I could consider the products of my own mind. The only experience I had had of such a phenomenon in my previous life was the luridness with which, at a certain point, I had imagined doing some violence to myself: it was, I suppose, at this very point that my belief in the life I was living and my inability to live it any longer were fighting a sort of duel to the death. I believe I glimpsed something in those moments, a horror of or hatred for myself, that was like the threshold to a whole underside of personality: it was a monster I saw, Jeffers, an ugly, thrashing colossus, and I banged the door on it as fast as I could, though not fast enough to stop it taking a big gouge out of me. Later, when I came to live at the marsh and looked back on my memories, I found that I viewed myself in the cruellest light. Never have I yearned more to be capable of creating something than at that time. It felt as though only that – to express or reflect some aspect of existence – would atone for the awful knowledge I seemed to have acquired. I had lost the blind belief in events and the immersion in my own being that I realised had made existence bearable up to that point. This loss seemed to me to constitute nothing less than the gain of perceptual authority. It felt as though it was an authority beyond language: I was so certain I could visualise it that I even bought painting materials and set myself up in a corner of the house, but what I experienced there was the opposite of release, Jeffers. Instead it was as if a total and permanent disability had suddenly taken hold of my body, a paralysis within which I would have to live wide awake for evermore.

As Sophocles said it – how dreadful knowledge of the truth