Ilse’s Reviews > Outline > Status Update

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.