Ilse’s Reviews > The Last Supper > Status Update
Ilse
is on page 120 of 256
We eat sheep's milk cheese and tomatoes. We eat the rough white bread. It is strange to eat the same things over and over again.It is not that we dislike this new, narrow range of satisfactions: on the contrary, the idea of eating at a wider scope begins to seem more and more grotesque. It is important to be satisfied by what is known to you. Is that not a basic truth, biblical like the olive tree?
— Dec 12, 2025 03:25AM
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Ilse’s Previous Updates
Ilse
is on page 200 of 256
It strikes me that the glory of art is the glory of survival, for survival is an inhuman property. It is an attribute of mountains and objects, of the worthless toys in the children's bedroom at home that will outlive us all. That which is human decays and disappears: only in art does the quality of humanity favour survival. Only in art is a record kept of an instant, that the next instant doesn't erase.
— Dec 20, 2025 05:58AM
Ilse
is on page 194 of 256
I am thinking about the future, though these thoughts are wordless and indistinct.. They are like running water, they pour towards an edge, a precipice,and tumble over the side. I don't want to go home Life could become flat again. It is desire that is big and grand and treacherous; desire, not life.
— Dec 20, 2025 05:55AM
Ilse
is on page 187 of 256
We turn to art to dignify our eexperience of the world;to find a reply to the question of consciousness.But I, too, have a qualm about the Fra Angelicos, the Peruginos.It is that they belong to the past.Their reality is so remote from our own:I fear to look at them is a form of nostalgia.I fear the feeling of sadness they cause me, sadness that our own world is not more beautiful.
(paradoxical thought, if you ask me)
— Dec 20, 2025 05:34AM
(paradoxical thought, if you ask me)
Ilse
is on page 140 of 256
In England,I became increasingly sure that to possess sth was to arrest knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession.But there is an element of death in knowledge.Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost.Its presence is painful,because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.
— Dec 20, 2025 02:01AM
Ilse
is on page 123 of 256
The spaghetti alle vongole is so delicious that it has a kind of holiness about it. Trained as we now are on sheep's milk cheese and white Italian flour, purged of our promiscuous tastes, we are capable of understanding it. It is our prize, our reward, this understanding. A pile of empty clam-shells remains on my plate like the integuments of a poem whose meaning I have finally teased out.
— Dec 19, 2025 03:04AM
Ilse
is on page 41 of 256
In the old town an atmosphere of unusual refinement prevails. Every infelicitous speck of modernity has been sieved out. Of course, the beautiful islands of the past in their turbid oceans of modernity are to be found all over Europe, in England too. At the heart of every hideous human settlement we find an image of our predeceased ancestor, aestheticism. It is our lot to defend that image, lifeless as it might seem.
— Dec 08, 2025 08:49AM
Ilse
is on page 39 of 256
After the exhilaration of escape, we find that we are all still here, unaltered. But we did not come here to find ourselves: we came for something we are able to identify only by its absence.
— Dec 07, 2025 08:49AM
Ilse
is on page 30 of 256
We have closed the door on England as one would close the door on a dark and cluttered house and walk out into the sun. It is this release, from the feeling of interiority, that I relish the most. Yet I love its darkness and clutter, its shady labyrinths of memory and emotion. They give rise to feelings of outward misshapenness, but they have their own value, the heavy metal coins of Englishness.
— Dec 06, 2025 03:05AM
Ilse
is on page 26 of 256
At home I often felt that our life lacked beauty:I looked for it in music,in poetry and painting,in the world itself,when a particular evening sky or fall of light,a glimpse of city trees in leaf,seemed to become more than itself. I would put peonies in a vase,tidy up,but I never found much art in daily things.There was always too much reality churning just ahead,mixing everything together into a grey agitated mass.
— Dec 03, 2025 08:29AM
Ilse
is on page 15 of 256
Always the effort of resistance, of counter-motion, of breaking off into what is untried and unknown: yet the unknown seems in its distance and blank mystery to contain for me a form of hope, a strange force that is pure possibility.
— Nov 29, 2025 02:33AM
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Jan-Maat
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Dec 12, 2025 04:12AM
It is strange to eat the same things but it is grotesque to imagine eating more? I am confused. Has she no happy medium?
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There is metabolic truth to this: the body will know how to break it down because it’s familiar, and then it can worry about something other than digestion. And, something other than food can be at the forefront of our thoughts. Simple truths.
Jan-Maat wrote: "It is strange to eat the same things but it is grotesque to imagine eating more? I am confused. Has she no happy medium?"Sorry, by abbreviating the quote, it must have given you a confusing and wrong impression of what she is writing about. She contrasts the Italian way of eating - simple, the same things over and over - with her family's eating habits in England, which she calls promiscuous ;) ("How could we ever have eaten curry one night and enchiladas the next? How could we have chillies and chocolate bars and pancakes and wonton in the same twenty-four hours? Our bodies remember by its absence the feeling of being thronged, of moving between hemispheres and time zones in the pause between breakfast and lunch, of being overrun, a hub of transient sensations like an airport terminal."). Her relation to food is quite interesting ;).
Ilse wrote: "Jan-Maat wrote: "It is strange to eat the same things but it is grotesque to imagine eating more? I am confused. Has she no happy medium?"Sorry, by abbreviating the quote, it must have given you a..."
Ilse wrote: "Jan-Maat wrote: "It is strange to eat the same things but it is grotesque to imagine eating more? I am confused. Has she no happy medium?"
Sorry, by abbreviating the quote, it must have given you a..."
Thank you, no, I am simply not tuned into Cusk, I do get the impression of somebody who can get overwhelmed by sensations and who needs to manage herself quite carefully?
Tirui wrote: "There is metabolic truth to this: the body will know how to break it down because it’s familiar, and then it can worry about something other than digestion. And, something other than food can be at the forefront of our thoughts.Simple truths.
Great insight, Tirui - and the time and mental space it takes to feed a family day in day out keeps astonishing me (for my daughter food seems what she loves the most), and in crazily busy periods at work like this one now, I am happy to rely on a small repertoire of simple recipes which I can prepare almost without thinking, while my mind continues with the work :).
Jan-Maat wrote: Thank you, no, I am simply not tuned into Cusk, I do get the impression of somebody who can get overwhelmed by sensations and who needs to manage herself quite carefully?On Cusk, I cannot say I manage to tune into her very much either, though I find it fascinating how she/her narrators often respond to their environment in a for me surprising way, that makes me shake my head or jump. Her perspective seems often twisted, she seems to experience the outside world as hostile and inhospitable, as if the narrator shows a heightened reaction to external triggers, a hypersensitivity of the senses she tries to contain by words. This chapter on food, touching on childhood memories of disgust and fear connected to food, rather than comfort, struck me as quite revealing, and also telling in relation to a certain fatphobia I discerned throughout the book.
Ilse wrote: "Jan-Maat wrote: Thank you, no, I am simply not tuned into Cusk, I do get the impression of somebody who can get overwhelmed by sensations and who needs to manage herself quite carefully?On Cusk, I..."
Yes, i had that impression from her trilogy too, that she had either been through ir been attentive to people who had been through some harsh experiences. Didn't you say somewhere that she had been at a school run by nuns?
From the trilogy, 'Parade', this book and her essay book, I am unable to put my finger on what kind of experiences (apart from conflicts with her parents in the essay 'Coventry' shaped that attention, only having a feeling they indeed must have been tough to live through - that it lingers in her words and thoughts without explicitely spelling those out, intrigues me to read on. And of course, you are right - she had been to a school run by nuns, which must have been a traumatic experience. One can only imagine the horror thinking of what they made her eat!
Ilse wrote: "From the trilogy, 'Parade', this book and her essay book, I am unable to put my finger on what kind of experiences (apart from conflicts with her parents in the essay 'Coventry' shaped that attenti..."Do you think then that the main interest in reading rachel cusk is getting to know Rachel cusk? That almost makes her sound like charles dickens.
