Ilse’s Reviews > Outline > Status Update
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
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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 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 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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Aug 07, 2025 11:18PM
Perhaps that desire for a perfect life is a thread that links many, if not all, the characters in rhe trilogy?
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Jan-Maat wrote: "Perhaps that desire for a perfect life is a thread that links many, if not all, the characters in rhe trilogy?"You make me wonder if such desire is something utterly topical - which again makes Cusk on the top of the times - or something that is more universal in time? That's a very interesting angle to look at the characters, I'll keep that in mind when progrossing in the trilogy, in the second instalment she anyway seems to like to use words relating to perfection :). Shortly after this reflection on perfection, another one follows - which I didn't post, because I dislike both the words 'flaws' and 'perfection', and definitely when relating them to people ;):
We should accept occasionally being inconvenienced by our conveniences, he said, just as we had to tolerate flaws in our loved ones: nothing was ever perfect, he said.
Ilse wrote: "Jan-Maat wrote: "Perhaps that desire for a perfect life is a thread that links many, if not all, the characters in rhe trilogy?"You make me wonder if such desire is something utterly topical - whi..."
Ah, but you are a humanist...
My feeling is un iversal rather than topical, juat thinking of the ancient philosophers - the right way to die, the right way to think, religions with their rules about the correct way to live: eat this, don't eat that, don't ever have sex like that...
On the ancient philosophers, I thought rather of the good life than perfection was the purpose? Cusk's characters - in the vein of pitch-perfect holiday pictures - not concerned on how to be and live good but on how the picture looks to others (or themselves?)
Ilse wrote: "On the ancient philosophers, I thought rather of the good life than perfection was the purpose? Cusk's characters - in the vein of pitch-perfect holiday pictures - not concerned on how to be and li..."Orthopraxy ;)
There is a right way, and you've got to be seen to be doing it!
