I find that last scene on the beach unnerving. The first time I read the books, I was mystified by it. Now the man who (I think) menaces her at the very end seems in keeping with the stories we hear of ex-husbands determined to wield power. #rachelcusktogether

"He understood that he had given some of his freedom away, through a desire to avoid or alleviate his own suffering, and while it didn't seem exactly an unfair exchange, I believed he wouldn't do it again so easily." #rachelcusktogether

"I wonder...if you have ever thought of what it would be like to live in the sun... You wouldn't have to suffer anymore." Just now, in winter's intense grip with no end in sight, I can almost believe this. #rachelcusktogether

Happy to return to Yamamoto at the end. Ludo has given up seeking a father and is now seeking...a partnership? With someone on a similar intellectual/spiritual quest via art and knowledge. #Discuss_DeWitt_2025

"Stories need cruelty in order for them to work" Sophia suggests. I think about this often. It's hard for me to write cruelty. Painful to read too, but affecting--and there is plenty of cruelty in the world. Hmm #rachelcusktogether

I do love the story of the Welsh novelist determined to reach the sea, only to clamber into a military zone, where he is held at gunpoint and then offered tarts and tea. 🤣 #rachelcusktogether

"Dear Isabel, I have a motion much imports your good; Whereto if you'll a willing ear incline, What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine." He takes her acceptance for granted. But she seemed pretty eager to enter the convent earlier. Oh well, the Duke has other plans. 🙄 #TheBard_ProblemPlays

"When you play bridge with beginners...you give them some...rules to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you'd had their hand you wouldn't have played the thing you told them to play, because you'd have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply." #Discuss_DeWitt_2025

"I don't know what one would look for in an uncontrovertible message from above; the question is what would convince a 17-year old and a gambler and God...naturally did not waste time beaming syllogisms into the mind of a girl who found 10 minutes of Italian a crashing bore." #Discuss_DeWitt_2025

"It was natural...for him to side with his father...and his father had shown little restraint in exploiting that loyalty...until he [the son] was physically immobilized...and...the facts of his life became much clearer. One of those facts was that his father rarely called..." #rachelcusktogether

"He should have lived Save that his riotous youth, with dangerous sense, Might in the times to come have ta'en revenge, By so receiving a dishonored life With such ransom of shame. Would yet he had lived!" Angelo feels the blood on his hands. Measure for Measure #TheBard_ProblemPlays

Ryan returns, etiolated and hobbling, yet enjoying wild worldly success thanks to a smartwatch and a student who knows everything about 15th Cent Venice. #rachelcusktogether

"Her brother's other friends were unfailingly charming, so that she could not talk to one without instantly afterwards taking out a horse and setting it at a six-foot fence. She had never met a man who could open his mouth without imperiling the life of a horse." #Discuss_DeWitt_2025

"He had not killed to learn those moodless verbs and uninflected nouns, but he had brought a slave into existence for their sake." Ludo, frustrated in his second attempt to find a worthy father figure. #Discuss_DeWitt_2025

Abhorson: A bawd, sir? Fie upon him! He will discredit our mystery. Pompey: ...do you call, sir, your occupation a mystery? Abhor.: Ay, sir, a mystery. Abhorson, the executioner... I confess I don't understand the "proof" he gives Pompey, but he does not take his job lightly. #TheBard_ProblemPlays

"As far as he knew a problem couldn't be solved simply by infinitely restating it, unless you relied on infinity itself to break certain factors down." Or doing the same thing over and over expecting different results? Insanity, we're told (and yet common). #rachelcusktogether

The first husband's hissing hatred adds yet more poison to this frightful story... The bells erupt! and the rain... "I stood there with the water running down my hair and over my face and my clothes, watching the whole world gradually transfer itself into the mirror at my feet." #rachelcusktogether

"'And I can't get over the feeling,' she said, 'that it was all stolen from me.'" The brutal irony of the interviewer's husband's illness (when she was hoping he would leave her) and her bitter jealousy of her sister combine to make this a particularly troubling story. #rachelcusktogether

"Heaven shield my mother played my father fair! For such a warped slip of wilderness Ne'er issued from his blood." A warped slip of wilderness... there's a Shakespearean epithet! #MeasureforMeasure_2026

"I was reading Die Zeit and I came across this lovely line, Es regnete ununterbrochen. It rained uninterruptedly... Es regnete ununterbrochen...I shall think of it whenever it rains." A rainy morning here, reading. #Discuss_DeWitt_2025

Act II, Sc. 4: Angelo and Isabella vie rhetorically until Angelo, vested with the power of the state, simply demands, "Redeem thy brother by yielding up thy body to my will..." As for reporting him, "Say what you can, my false o'erweighs your true." !!! #Measureformeasure_2025

The interviewer greets her with striking eloquence about the city's labyrinthine road system: "The giant freeways circled the city without penetrating it...to get anywhere, you had to go everywhere..." It occurs to me that what we have in Cusk is heightened rhetorical reality. #rachelcusktogether

Isabella's exhortation scene is fantastic, with Lucio goading and commenting on her passion and rhetoric throughout. She does warm to her subject. "O it is excellent to have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant." Yes. #MeasureforMeasure_2025

"'The hero is a man actively engaged in becoming himself--never a very reassuring sight. The villain on the other hand has already become something...He has found what is to his advantage and acts accordingly." Donald Richie on Sugata Sanshiro #Discuss_DeWitt_2025

Sibylla refuses to reveal who Ludo's father is (a mediocre travel writer) until he is able to discern banality in art-"la formule est banale." Ludo, meanwhile, checks out all the travel narratives he can find and enjoys Darwin but works out it can't be him as he died in 1882. #Discuss_DeWitt_2025

"I hated beating him...I only had to do it two or three times in his life. We both knew he couldn't have been what he was without it." This strikes me as...unhinged? He thinks the dog understands the necessity of these (rare) beatings--they make him all the dog he can be? Hmm. #RachelCuskTogether

"She couldn't stand the sound of certain words and would scream and put her hands over her ears if anyone said them." I am fascinated by this. What words? Later he gives some sentences that upset her and I wondered what words in them are the triggers. #RachelCuskTogether

"They stood in a row, their mouths emitting sounds that... merged together in a chorus of protest. The candles flamed around them, streaking them in red and orange light...so that it almost looked as though they were burning." The anguish contained in this fog-bound dinner party. #rachelcusktogether

Also can't get over the guy (a date?) who breaks her window to get his briefcase out of her car when she loses her keys, then leaves her to wait for help with a shrieking alarm. Wow, that's a choice. An illuminating one. Not partner material. #rachelcusktogether

"St. Francis...lived in a state that other people called innocence but that I viewed as utter nihilism." Radical statement about this iconic spiritual figure. Francis seems more Buddhist than Catholic to me (stigmata aside). Is it his non-attachment she construes as nihilism? #rachelcusktogether

John has served his sentence… I wonder if this dark book is Faye’s sentence for the transgression (as she sees it) of oblivious immersion she describes to Paniotis and her “criminal” (in her mind) treatment of Gerard. #rachelcusktogether

Ah, Tony, not helping matters. He's sheepish after seeing Paula and confesses to his "strategy." Faye senses he's imposing his interpretation on events he doesn't understand, which suggests to me that Paula controlled the exchange. But it doesn't make me feel better about him. #rachelcusktogether

When re-reading, I'm always struck by what has stayed with me from a book--in this case, Pavel's (homesick) fascination with the arrivals gate at Heathrow. #rachelcusktogether

At least Paula makes no pretense; her malice is naked. #rachelcusktogether

"Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story...no narrative flights, no plot developments, no immersive human dramas-to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time." Yikes #rachelcusktogether

"His head on its still-narrow neck came out of the top, so that it looked almost dissociated from the mass beneath it... It was a photograph of a tormented child imprisoned in a great rock of flesh." Frightful. #rachelcusktogether

"'You're like a teenager,' he said." What? #rachelcusktogether

"He introduced himself--his name was Oliver--and said that he had spent nearly the whole event watching us sitting there in our wet clothes and thinking about the issue of humiliation..." I can't help but find some deadpan humor in this.. #rachelcusktogether

"He had a loud voice and manner which looked always to be on the verge of some clumsiness or mishap but which in fact was rapidly and pointedly satirical, so that you'd been accurately mocked before you even realized you'd been seen." Julian. #rachelkusktogether

"Some of these roots had penetrated to the surface: their blind, snake-like forms, thicker than a human arm, lay impacted in the stone." Trees are dramatic in this volume. (Also "penetrated to the surface" is an interesting, paradoxical phrase.) #rachelcusktogether

Literally "shattering" conclusion to chapter 3. I had forgotten it, but remembered the instant the boy appeared with his mother. I was incensed at their departure without so much as an apology (or even paying for the haircut?). Poor Dale. #rachelcusktogether

"Once you put people in a position of power over other people, he said, there's no knowing what they'll do." True. #rachelcusktogether

"The people below had evidently remained unreconciled to the fact of others living above their heads." Uh-oh #rachelcusktogether

The description of the garden is at once dismal and desperate: "an apple tree that drooped amidst its own rotted, fallen fruit," other trees "frozen in postures of madness and distress," "sick-looking grey pigeons," and the "shrivelled, hobbling dog" peeing on the steps. 😬 #rachelcusktogether

Gerard, like Paniotis, thought Faye was living the perfect life. Faye herself, now that this life has been "jettisoned," again describes a sense of being punished, perhaps with more reason when it comes to Gerard. But he is similarly surprised--and also rejects the idea. #rachelcusktogether

Anne's crisis is frightful. She has lost "a native language of self." Words have become labels that reduce/nullify things and people, rather than bringing them to life. #rachelcusktogether

I'm interested in how Cusk returns to the title word here in the last chapter. It appears on the first page with respect to the billionaire's narrative, a (confident) outline of his life; now Anne feels herself to be a negative outline created by another person's narrative. Hmm. #rachelcusktogether

"If a man had a nasty side...She didn't want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it... Melete laughed. 'According to that logic...there can be no relationship at all. There can only be people stalking one another.'" #rachelcusktogether

Christos' story is my favorite...his phobia of dancing cured by 50s garb and the Lindy Hop. "I found myself not falling but flying, flying up and up, around and around, so fast and so high that I seemed to fly clear even of my body itself." #RachelCuskTogether

The faithless husband belting Carmen in the shower. 🤣 Gotta love it (unless you're the wife). #rachelcusktogether