Ilse’s Reviews > Outline > Status Update
Ilse
is on page 73 of 249
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.
— Jul 27, 2025 08:28AM
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Ilse’s Previous Updates
Ilse
is on page 218 of 249
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 the knives that on one else can see.
— Aug 18, 2025 04:00AM
Ilse
is on page 206 of 249
She remembered a piece of music by Olivier Messiaen, written during his internment in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. Some of it was based, or so she had understood, on the patterns of birdsong he had heard around him while under detention there. It struck her that the man was caged while the birds were free, and that what he had written down was the sound of their freedom.
— Aug 15, 2025 03:42AM
Ilse
is on page 164 of 249
At the wedding, asked by friends what it was she saw in him - a pertinent enough question, he conceded, at the time - she had replied, I find him interesting.
I said that it didn't sound such a bad reason to marry someone.
— Aug 13, 2025 09:31AM
I said that it didn't sound such a bad reason to marry someone.
Ilse
is on page 160 of 249
It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive ou to your own destruction. Perhaps 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.
— Aug 11, 2025 05:45AM
Ilse
is on page 150 of 249
‘Music’, she said, in a langerous 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’.
— Aug 09, 2025 02:35AM
Ilse
is on page 124 of 249
Children leave or children stay depending on their ambitions: their lives are their own. Somehow we 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.
— Aug 07, 2025 03:28AM
Ilse
is on page 113 of 249
When she does see women wearing such shoes, it makes her feel sad. She had believed, until now, that this was because she found such women pitiful, but in fact when she thinks about it honestly it is because she feels excluded or disbarred from the concept of womanhood the shoes represent. She feels, almost, as if she isn't a woman at all. But if she isn't a woman, what is she?
— Aug 06, 2025 09:36AM
Ilse
is on page 105 of 249
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.
— Aug 04, 2025 08:57AM
Ilse
is on page 83 of 249
There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such things as a life without pain.
— Aug 02, 2025 02:46AM
Ilse
is on page 41 of 249
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.
— Jul 26, 2025 05:18AM
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I read your quote and it sounded so right and real, that it reminded me of that unique sensation of listening to one’s breath, underwater. I know that freedom feeling!Definitely a good bit that makes me want to read the book .
Katia wrote: "And almost at the same time I am reading this by Lispector, dear Ilse “The freedom she sometimes felt. It didn’t come from clear reflections, but a state that seemed to be made of perceptions too..."
What a beauteous and perceptive evocation of the feeling of freedom, thank you very much for sharing this passage by Lispector, which makes me even more curious to read her. I thought of Woolf's writing as an influence on Cusk's, but this interior observation of Lispector makes me wonder if Lispector colours Cusk's writing too...
I thought it was a bit of conversation going between Lispector and later Woolf at her most experimental stage, especially The Waves. It might be L read her. But more likely it was a sort of osmosis in style, time, themes. This book was written in 1943 and she was only 23 or so. And just in time I came across on the quote from "The room on her own." : A Room Of One's Own: “ For masterpieces are not single and solitary births, they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice” .
Love this quote, Ilse. I think we can all relate ☺️
Catarina wrote: "I read your quote and it sounded so right and real, that it reminded me of that unique sensation of listening to one’s breath, underwater. I know that freedom feeling!Definitely a good bit that makes me want to read the book.
Catarina, I was amused to see Deborah Levy's love of swimming that seems to be present in every book I read by her, reflected in this scene in Rachel Cusk :) - speaking about that sensation, you touch upon times bygone, it must have been more than four decades ago I lastly put my head underwater - now you describe that sensation, I want to try it again :)! And yes, do read this book, thinking of your love for art and interest in feminism, Cusk might be right up your alley. So far, this is the Cusk I liked the most, it is more accessible (and in my humble opinion) and more funny than 'Parade' or her essay collection Coventry: Essays.
Katia wrote: "I thought it was a bit of conversation going between Lispector and later Woolf at her most experimental stage, especially The Waves. It might be L read her. But more likely it was a sort of osmosis..."That is pretty astonishing, dear Katia - how interesting, those echoes of Woolf in Lispector and how her writing conversed with woolf's - another reason to read her! I loved that insight of yours, on the osmosis of style, themes and time (more banally 'it was in the air', as we would say in Dutch :) - on such osmosis, Vienna around 1900 comes to mind, but you show astutely how this phenomenon can be seen over borders, times and places too - which reminds me I have to read Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?! (and talking about the latter, the 'he said' 'she said' in Cusk also reminds me of him)
Jennifer wrote: "Love this quote, Ilse. I think we can all relate ☺️"Jennifer, glad you loved the quote and I agree, this is a yearning for freedom and getting away from it all that most of us can relate to - if not by swimming, than by walking or just jumping on a train :D!
“The freedom she sometimes felt. It didn’t come from clear reflections, but a state that seemed to be made of perceptions too organic to be formulated as thoughts. Sometimes at the bottom of the feeling wavered an idea that gave her a vague awareness of its kind and color.
Climbing the hill, stopping at the top and, without looking, feeling the ground covered behind her, the farm in the distance. The wind ruffling her clothes, her hair. Her arms free, heart closing and opening wildly, but her face bright and serene under the sun. “