Ilse’s Reviews > Outline > Status Update
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
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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 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
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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Alexander
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Aug 02, 2025 03:22AM
Well, it may seem also that a lot suddenly is called "pain" what was not pain earlier. In this case, it is difficult to distinguish what it means "life without pain" - for me it would mean, a life without deep wounds, irreversible losses, drastic violence. In my world, though, there is life without pain. What do you mean? Is it really pain to lose a friend or a partner, or is it a challenge to reinvent myself, more an inconvenience, more something subtle? Losing an arm is something quite different.
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Is this something that one of Faye's students says or is itvdomethibgvthat she thinks to herself? I don't remember already 😢
Alexander wrote: "Well, it may seem also that a lot suddenly is called "pain" what was not pain earlier. In this case, it is difficult to distinguish what it means "life without pain" - for me it would mean, a life ..."Alexander, good point that what is seen as "pain" might have changed over the years - as maybe also what is acknowledged as "pain" ( in the 1980s, it was widely believed by medical professionals that babies could not feel pain, with medical procedures such as surgeries being regularly performed without anesthesia). Is it only physical pain - like losing an arm, or pain inflicted by violence - to be considered real pain, or is the pain which Cusk refers to a broader concept of suffering? The suffering because of losing a friend or partner, the grief when a dear one dies, can likely also be felt physically, in the body, the heart. While it is true that not everyone will experience devastating loss or debilating physical pain in childhood, I concurred with the general idea that childhood (in hindsight, as a nostalgia for a painless perfection that I think only rarely exists ) is idealized too much, as well as coming with the flipside of putting too much responsibility on the parents, required to make that childlood entirely painless, which is unrealistic).
What is it about humans that make them want to see childhood with rose-colored glasses? It seems we would be in better shape if we stared boldly on the face what really goes on there.
Jan-Maat wrote: "Is this something that one of Faye's students says or is itvdomethibgvthat she thinks to herself? I don't remember already 😢"It is just one line in a book that constantly shifts between 'he said' and 'she said' without repeating who is speaking, and you remembered Faye! (this morning I realised I had already forgotten the name of the protagonist of a series I am currently reading - tinternet told me it was Clémentine - a name I thought I would remember :(
It is the mother of her neighbour from the plane, who responds to his fear on the effects of his divorce on his children, telling him that 'family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn't divorce, it would be something else. 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'.
This struck me as a reflection that could be autobiographical - and also perhaps true, and if not, anyway comforting or reassuring.
Jennifer wrote: "What is it about humans that make them want to see childhood with rose-colored glasses? It seems we would be in better shape if we stared boldly on the face what really goes on there."Jennifer, exactly! Do you see what it is? Is it the absence of duty, of having to take and carry full responsibility, of having to solve problems of yourselves and others? What is a good childhood?
