Each Saturday, Harper’s Magazine editors recommend a piece of writing from our archive. This weekend, in anticipation of the release of her novel Life of M, read Rachel Cusk’s 2023 essay on seeing and self-concealment. To gain access to our fully digitized archive, subscribe today.
On seeing without being seen
By Rachel Cusk
Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did—the rest of her remained obstinately alive. She took a considerable time to die and outlasted the nurses’ predictions by many days, so that those of us who had been summoned to her bedside had to depart and return to our lives.
No one cried at her death, though among the congregation at the funeral there were some outbursts of shocked weeping, as though at the sight of death being surprised in the act of stealing from life. It was the entrance of the coffin, rather than the death itself, that constituted the violence of this act. The coffin was shocking, and this must always be the case, whether or not one disliked being confined to the facts as much as our mother had. The body inside the coffin was entirely factual. She had never seemed to take much notice of her body: it had been her vehicle, that was all. But its authority, it turned out, had been absolute.
For a while afterward there was a feeling of lightness—a feeling almost of freedom. The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity. A capital sum had been returned to the living: we on the side of life had been in some way increased. But in fact an unease remained, which grew and which was our mother’s impenetrable bequest to us. There ought to have been a feeling not of freedom but of loss. If there was loss, then it was of something we had never had. We were free simply from the conundrum of this double loss.
It was noted that at the funeral we had remained unmoved. It was a day of extreme, almost frightening heat, like the day of Meursault’s mother’s funeral at the beginning of Camus’s The Stranger. Meursault’s seeming indifference that day was also noted: it later became a central piece of evidence in his trial and conviction as a heartless killer. Was our indifference likewise a philosophical refutation of the social contract? Had we too run the risk of being arrested and convicted for the failure to adhere to cultural and moral narratives?
Months later, at dawn on the ninth floor of a hotel in The Hague, standing before a view of astonishing ugliness, it became evident that our mother was accompanying us in a way she had not when she was alive. Far below people scurried across the concrete spaces in the cold gray morning. A violent wind was blowing. It shook the power lines and the leafless trees. It rattled the hoardings outside the shop fronts. It upended the litter bins and sent their contents whirling madly into the air.
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