Housekeeping by marilynne robinson book report……
These are my favorite passages, after reading this book for the first time.
-----My mother was happy that day, we did not know why. And if she was sad the next, we did not know why. It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously, like a thing in the water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad and heady dance. Page 213
I don’t need to say anything more about why and how this touched me.
But I do want to send out a big powerful prayer to ask for any and all assistance in freeing me and any others in my beloved earth family, all 6 billion of us, who suffer from our own versions of this sad and heady dance. That sounds so cheesy to me right now, asking for help in a single sentence, for all of us, so simply. But why not! To hell with my fear of cheese.
-----I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, this I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined. I will try to tell you the plain truth. Page 215-216
The plain truth. That is what I am in love with, and have the hardest time myself in knowing when I have moved beyond sensing, and slipped into storytelling. It happens so easily, so naturally. And it is sometimes impossible to know the plain truth because I am so involved in my stories. So what ruthie did to attempt telling the plain truth, was simply state what happened. And Not what was going through her head when it happened. That is a smart way to go about revealing the plain truth, giving it a chance to breathe on its own. Giving yourself some space for a moment, or as long as you can manage, until you’re off and running, the master of story that you are. I would just like to remember and stay clear about what really happened, and when my mind stepped in to fluff things up. That sounds like it could be very helpful to me and my innate abilty to complicate and color things to the point where I no longer know where I started or where I am going or what I am doing in general. Oh yeah, breathing?
------between darkness and water the wind was as sour as a coin, and I wished utterly to be elsewhere, and that and the moonlight made the world seem very broad. Sylvie had no awareness of time. For her, hours and minutes were the names of trains- we were waiting for the 9:52. Sylvie seemed neither patient nor impatient, just as she seemed neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. She was merely quiet, unless she sang, and still, unless she pulled us outward from the bridge. I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected- an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind. Page 165-166
Wholly holy fuck. i am deeply in love with this passage. Is this woman, ms robinson, a mystic or what?
-----I have often wondered what it seemed like to Sylvie to come back to that house, which would have changed since she left it, shifted and settled. I imagine her with her grips in her bare hands, walking down the middle of the road, which was narrowed by the banks of plowed snow on either side, and narrowed more by the slushy pools that were forming at the foot of each bank. Sylvie always walked with her head down, to one side, with an abstracted and considering expression, as if someone were speaking to her in a soft voice. But she would have glanced up sometimes at the snow, which was the color of heavy clouds, and the sky, which was the color of melting snow, and all the slick black planks and sticks and stumps that erupted as the snow sank away.
How must it have seemed to step into the narrow hallway which still kept (as it seemed to me) a trace of the rude odor that the funeral flowers had begun to make before nona could bring herself to throw them away. Her hands and feet must have ached from the warmth. I remember how red and twisted her hands looked, lying in the lap of her green dress, and how she pressed her arms to her sides. I remember that, as she sat there in a wooden chair in the white kitchen, smoothing her borrowed-looking dress and working her feet out of her loafers, sustaining all our stares with the placid modesty of a virgin who has conceived, her happiness was palpable. Page 48-49
mmmmmmmm. I have read this many times. It reveals more to me every time. I especially like coming back to this passage, after having read the book, and seeing that Sylvie was introduced as a happy woman. Because as you get to know her more intimately, and you discover how removed from society she likes to be, it is hard not to wonder and imagine that she is very unhappy. And now I wonder actually if Lucille is the most unhappy, how she ran from the blatant differences (or were they differences at all, or just aspects of herself that she could not get comfortable with?) of her aunt and sister into a life focused on conforming. And when we conform, what are we conforming to actually? Someone, or a group of people, who seem to have traits we desire? My question is are we trying to be less like ourselves, and more like others, or are we honestly trying to evolve?
i appreciate this book so much. thank you ms. robinson for writing it.
as we were leaving the fair, there were sirens going in all directions because there were some funnel clouds spotted nearby. i asked david as we were driving away, what would we do if we saw one. he said we would just drive in the other direction quickly, because they only go about 35 miles an hour. i don't know if he really knows that for sure. lately i've been calling him on some of the information he gives me, just like, 'how do you know that?'....and there have been a couple times too many where he can't tell me. so i go and check out his info on line or in a book and yeah, he's just making shit up. ha! is this a male species trait, or what? trying to puff themselves up a bit, maybe?
