Housekeeping

by Marilynne Robinson

escaped this world

It was he who put us down in this unlikely place.

in a house dug out of the ground, with windows just at earth level and just at eye level, so that from without, the house was a mere mound, n...

the perfect horizontality of the world in that place foreshortened the view so severely that the horizon seemed to circumscr...

began to read what he could find of trav...

They were all suave cones or mounds, single or in heaps or clusters, green, brown, or white, depending on the season, but always snowcapped, these caps being pink, white, or gold, depending on the time of day.

the nap stands out on folded plush.

Grass?

Whether the genius of this painting was ignorance or fancy I never could decide.

The terrain on which the town itself is built is relatively level, having once belonged to the lake.

the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins,

Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return.

and the grass will stand in chill water to its tips.

Plush

Our house was at the edge of town on a little hill,

That's Never Good

so we rarely had more than a black pool in our cellar, with a few skeletal insects skidding around on it.

Foreshadowing?

A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands.

The train, which was black and sleek and elegant, and was called the Fireball,

Would it sink like a stone despite its speed, or slide like an eel despite its weight?

which had been mined by the water

After a while some of the younger boys came out on the bridge and began to jump off, at first cautiously and then almost exuberantly, with whoops of fear.

Important

and the sky grew bright as tin.

knitted themselves up like bits of a reflection.

the water was becoming dull and opaque, like cooling wax.

By evening the lake there had sealed itself over.

Fingerbone:

Sewickley, Pennsylvania,

They said the wind smelled of it, and they could taste it in the drinking water, and they could not abide the smell, the taste, or the sight of it.

It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.

unalloyed by any other element.

At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains.

Grandfather

At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And abov...

The physical geography of Fingerbone. The old lake is the lowest landmark, then the town, then the sky, and perhaps clouds. This may also be a metaphorical/narrative hierarchy.

That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.

How many times had she waked in the morning to find him gone? And sometimes for whole days he would walk around singing to himself in a thin voice, and speak to her and his children as a very civil man would speak to strangers. And now he had vanished finally.

Dementia, Alzheimer’s

After a while they would turn on the radio and start brushing Sylvie’s hair, which was light brown and heavy and hung down to her waist. The older girls were expert at building it into pompadours with ringlets at ear and nape. Sylvie crossed her legs at the ankles and read magazines. When she got sleepy she would go off to her room and take a nap, and come down to supper with her gorgeous hair rumpled and awry. Nothing could induce vanity in her.

Molly and Helen fastidious, Sylvie with milk on her lip.

In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she put them in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon.

Examples of common meanings of different coloured roses are: true love (red), mystery (blue), innocence or purity (white), death (black), friendship (yellow), and passion (orange).

and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails fill with wind.

Once, while they were still childless, Edmund had found a pocket watch on the shore. The case and the crystal were undamaged, but the works were nearly consumed by rust. He opened the watch and emptied it, and where the face had been he fitted a circle of paper on which he had painted two seahorses. He gave it to her as a pendant, with a chain through it, but she hardly ever wore it because the chain was too short to allow her to look at the seahorses comfortably. She worried that it would be damaged on her belt or in her pocket. For perhaps a week she carried the watch wherever she went, even across the room, and it was not because Edmund had made it for her, or because the painting was less vivid and awkward than his paintings usually were, but because the seahorses themselves were so arch, so antic and heraldic, and armored in the husks of insects. It was the seahorses themselves that she wanted to see as soon as she took her eyes away, and that she wanted to see even when she was looking at them. The wanting never subsided until something—a quarrel, a visit—took her attention away. In the same way her daughters would touch her and watch her and follow her, for a while.

Sometimes they cried out at night, small thin cries that never woke them.

@_@ Thas not good

The sound would stop as she started up the stairs, however softly, and when she reached their rooms she would find them all quietly asleep, the source of the cry hiding in silence, like a cricket. Just her coming was enough to still the creature.

"Still the creature"

The years between her husband’s death and her eldest daughter’s leaving home were, in fact, years of almost perfect serenity.

With him gone they were cut free from the troublesome possibility of success, r...

Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time. If heaven was to be this world purged of disaster and nuisance, if immortality was to be this life held in poise and arrest, and if this world purged and this life unconsuming could be thought of as world and life restored to their proper natures, it is no wonder that fi...

M...

Eldest Daughter of Sylvia

one on the Resurrection and another on the march of Christ’s legions through the world.

the angels come to roll away / The stone that seals their tomb.”

Foreshadowing?

Reginald Stone, our putative father.

He was apparently a pale fellow with sleek black hair. He appears at ease in his dark suit. Clearly he does not consider himself the subject of either photograph. In one he is looking at my mother, who is speaking to Sylvie, whose back is to the camera.

Helen,

Narrator's grandmother

housekeeping

POG

Sylvie

Aunt who takes the sisterz inn