Not Also Lost
Reflections on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping forty years after its release.
By Kaylene Graham
I first read Housekeeping on a sleet-silvered and damp January afternoon during what has been one of the most lonely and meaningful seasons of my life. That winter, I had grown familiar with the ache of absence and found myself, as Robinson’s Ruth does, searching to secure memories of those, once so near and familiar, now seemingly lost to me by distance or death. Like Ruth, I discovered my memories to be as arbitrary as the way my mother tucked her hair behind her ear, as accidental as sweat on the brow under a hot sun. Throughout Housekeeping, Ruth wrestles with the meaning of her memories after her mother’s suicide and her grandmother’s sudden death. Eventually, Ruth and her sister are entrusted to the care of their aunt Sylvie, a drifter, who takes up housekeeping in the old family home. Despite Sylvie’s oddities, Ruth clings to her, recognizing her as one who feels, as she does, “the life of perishing things.” Longing to be accepted into Sylvie’s unusual world, Ruth observes and mimics Sylvie, conforming to her ways so that her aunt “could as well be [her] mother.”
I too found myself drawn to Sylvie, consoled by her satisfaction to sit in the dark on darkening evenings and her reverence for decaying leaves and discarded bits of paper. In Sylvie’s silence, I found the fragments and flotsam of my own memories, full in their frailty and significant in their slightness. And so, as that winter afternoon waned into an ember-blue evening, I followed Ruth as she followed Sylvie, discovering within the reality of loss a hope in which all things will one day be knit up, recollected, and restored.
I sat alone by the window with the lights off in my apartment, sometimes reading by the weakening light, pausing occasionally in an attempt to remember the way my friend and mentor had knelt over the rows of reddening strawberries in his back garden days before he collapsed of heart failure—or how my mother must look, leaning over the bathroom sink to wash her face, three thousand miles away. In the moment, the ordinariness of these gestures had been a reality that seemed impervious to change. But I knew they were not.
As the words pooled into the shadow of the pages, expanding like fabric in water before sinking, I followed Ruth into the night on the shores of Fingerbone’s lake. In the darkness, she reflects,
“Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of their back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.”
What is left behind? “Flotsam… small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter.” Perhaps, I thought, we could surrender such things to a “perfect and permanent” darkness—but to consign the clutter of memories to oblivion implies that their loss would ever and only amount to a desolate and enduring loneliness.
To live into the lonely debris of memory, accepting that we are here “to look and not to buy,” is to embrace the expectation that everything which passes through this world will be re-collected.
Yet, as the expectation for her dead mother’s return haunts her dreams the next morning, Ruth realizes the strength of memory that draws us to recognize a “sense of imminent presence”—unseen and therefore free from the tricks of appearance. She reasons,
“If appearance is only a trick of the nerves, and apparition is only a lesser trick of the nerves, a less perfect illusion, then this expectation, this sense of a presence unperceived, was not particularly illusory as things in this world go.”
Had I not also at times, particularly in the haze of a darkening evening, sensed that strange and undefinable presence of those who were gone, either far from me or beyond my reach forever? All things perish under the inexorable pressure of time, but Ruth’s reflections tended toward a strange certainty, a suggestion that it would be no great wonder if “what perished need not also be lost.”
Hoping to recover what has been lost “in Sylvie’s house,” I followed Ruth as she followed her aunt to a valley across the lake—a place where someone had once built a home and planted an orchard. Once the sun climbs high enough over the valley to make the frost flower and glisten, Ruth’s eyes are opened to the full beauty of the “life of perished things.” Looking out at the abandoned homestead and orchard, Ruth imagines “a Carthage sown with salt,” which erupts “finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine”—abundance refracting from barrenness. Presented with such a vision, Ruth discovers that
“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 do our senses know anything 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, very craving gives it back to us again.”
Desire returns to us those very things that are lost. Our love, turning the memories of those no longer with us “over and over again… in the hope that memory will fulfill itself,” becomes prophecy. Behold, the presence unperceived will be restored to flesh, and we will see their eyes and feel their hands upon our hair. To recognize the inescapable passing of the world and even of oneself is to commit to a ghostly existence, a life of loneliness populated only by the frail and fragmented detritus of memory. Yet, it is from within this loneliness that the mysterious presence of a future in which all is restored is felt most, and memory becomes “the seat not only of prophecy but of miracle as well.”
I have read Housekeeping several more times since that late afternoon in January. With every reading, every journey across the lake of Fingerbone with Sylvie, I, like Ruth, am returned to the “absolute discovery” of human loneliness. But it is a loneliness full of longing that will not be left unsatisfied. One day I will see my friend look up again from his rows of strawberries, or enter my grandmother’s house to find her sitting with her own mother on the back porch, admiring the roses, speaking in low voices as though they had never suffered the years of separation that lie between them now. To live into the lonely debris of memory, accepting that we are here “to look and not to buy,” is to embrace the expectation that everything which passes through this world will be re-collected. Now, as I expect my own daughter to arrive this winter, I have grown all the more sensitive to the loveliness and temporariness of this life, vulnerable to a thousand joys that glitter for just a moment before vanishing. These first turnings of life within me will lengthen into leaps along a sidewalk. She will not always be with me, or I with her. But if the desire of memory speaks truly, then such small treasures as these shall not ever be truly lost.
Kaylene Graham studied theology and poetry at Yale Divinity School before moving to Arizona, where she currently teaches philosophy, literature, and poetry at a classical high school with her husband. When she isn’t busying herself with teaching or her own writing endeavors, she enjoys reading, houseplants, hiking, and hymns.