housekeeping

i recently finished the book housekeeping by marilynne robinson, and wanted to make a little space here to display some of the passages that made me melt into raptures only finely wrought prose can generate.

a few notes on people and setting to put the below in context (no spoilers, really, so read away with no fear). the book is narrated by ruth, who's mother dies early in the book so she and her sister are raised in their grandmother's house by their aunt, sylvie. the story takes place in the town of fingerbone, idaho, and in this first passage the town has been flooded.

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every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. so shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. so, fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance. but then suddenly the lake and the river broke open and the water slid away from the land, and fingerbone was left stripped and blackened and warped and awash in mud.

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for need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. to crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. for when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? and here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. for to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. so whatever we may lose, every craving gives it back to us again. though we may dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

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i knew why sylie felt there were children in the woods. i felt so, too, though i did not think so. i sat on the log pelting my shoe, because i knew that if i turned however quickly to look behind me the consciousness behind me would not still be there, and would only come closer when i turned away again. even if it spoke just at my ear, as it seemed often at the point of doing, when i turned there would be nothing there. in that way it was persistent and teasing and ungentle, the way half-wild, lonely children are. this was something lucille and i together would ignore, and i had been avoiding the shore all that fall, because when i was by myself and obviously lonely, too, the teasing would be much more difficult to disregard. having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. you simply say, "here are the perimeters of our attention. if you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. if you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire. i had been, so to speak, turned out of house now long enough to have observed this in myself. now there was neither threshold nor sill between me and these cold, solitary children who almost breathed against my cheek and almost touched my hair.

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if i could see my mother, it would not have to be her eyes, her hair. i would not need to touch her sleeve. there was no more the stoop of her high shoulders. the lake had taken that, i knew. it was so very long since the dark had swum her hair, and there was nothing more to dream of, but often she almost slipped through any door i saw from the side of my eye, and it was she, and not changed, and not perished. she was a music i no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.

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