Waarom voelt wat Rachel Cusk schrijft zo waar, zo wezenlijk? Ik pluk de vruchten van haar leven, haar mislukte huwelijk, haar eenzaamheid, haar nadenken daarover. ‘When people live, they get broken down by experience. I don’t mean that in a depressive way; I mean, you get less rigid.’
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It seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.
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When people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else.
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The first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them.
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The problem with being honest is that you’re slow to realise that other people can lie.
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The humiliation that was involved in maintaining the pretence of normality.
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How often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed in others.
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Like love, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again.
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A lot of people spent their lives trying to make things last as a way of avoiding asking themselves whether those things were what they really wanted.
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Perhaps none of us could ever know what was true and what wasn’t. And no examination of events, even long afterwards, was entirely stable.
Transit, Rachel Cusk