Waiting

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 hat the next moment might be utterly different.  And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention.  Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.

-Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Shenendoah

Transients, All of Us

"It was because of his tolerance of transients that they haunted the town as they did, sleeping in abandoned houses and in the ruins of fallen houses, and building their shanties and lean-tos under the bridge and along the shore.  They seldom spoke in our hearing or looked at us directly, but we stole glimpses of their faces.  They were like the people in old photographs -- we did not see them through a veil of knowledge and habit, but simply and plainly, as they were lined or scarred as they were startled or blank."  

Burnside's Bridge

"Like the dead, we could consider their histories complete, and we wondered only what had brought them to transiency, to drifting, since their lives as drifters were like pacings and broodings and skirmishings among ghosts who cannot pay their way across the Styx.  How ever long a postscript to however short a life, it was still no part of the story.  We imagined that if they spoke to us they would astonish us with tales of disaster and disgrace and bitter sorrow, that would fly into the hills and stay there in the dark earth and in the cries of birds.  For in the case of such pure sorrow, who can distinguish mine from thine?"

-Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Foreshadowing

"For need can blossom into all the compensations 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 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.  though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Harper's Ferry

A Claim on You

"She was such a little bit of a thing.  But while I was holding her, she opened her eyes.  I know she didn't really study my face.  Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.  But I know she did look right into my eyes.  That is something.  And I'm glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face.  Boughton and I have talked about that, too.  It has something to do with incarnation.  You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it.  Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it."

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Pennsylvania

A Dark Husk

"Once when Boughton and I had spent an evening going through our texts together and we were done talking them over, I walked him out to the porch, and there were more fireflies out there than I had ever seen in my life, thousands of them everywhere, just drifting up out of the grass, extinguishing themselves in midair.  We sat on the steps a good while in the dark and the silence, watching them.  Finally Boughton said,

'Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.'

And really, it was that night as if the earth were smoldering.  Well, it was, and it is.  An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet.  I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual, as well.  Perhaps Gilead.  Perhaps civilization.  Prod a little and the sparks will fly.  I don't know whether the verse put a blessing on the fireflies or the fireflies put a blessing on the verse, or if both of them together put a blessing on trouble, but I have loved them both a good deal ever since."

-Maryilynne Robinson, Gilead

Dawson's Cabin, Pennsylvania, December 8, 2013