"I do not think Sylvie was merely reticent. It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows. Sometimes we used to watch trains passing in the dark afternoon, creeping through the blue snow with their windows all alight, and full of people eating and arguing and reading newspapers. They could not see us watching, of course, because by five-thirty on a winter day the landscape had disappeared, and they would have seen their own depthless images on the black glass, if they had looked, and not the black trees and the black houses, or the slender black bridge and the dim blue expanse of the lake. Some of them probably did not know what it was the train approached so cautiously. Once, Lucille and I walked beside the train to the shore. There had been a freezing rain that glazed the snow with a crust of ice, and we found that, when the sun went down, the crust was thick enough for us to walk on. So we followed the train at a distance of twenty feet or so, falling now and then, because the glazed snow swelled and sank in dunes, and the tops of bushes and fence posts rose out of it in places where we did not expect them to be. But by crawling up, and sliding down, and steadying ourselves against the roof of sheds and rabbit hutches, we managed to stay just abreast of the window of a young woman with a small head and a small hat and a brightly painted face. She wore pearl-gray gloves that reached almost to her elbows, and hooped bracelets that fell down her arms when she reached up to push a loose wisp of hair underneath her hat. The woman looked at the window very often, clearly absorbed by what she saw, which was not but merely seemed to be Lucille and me scrambling to stay beside her, too breathless to shout. When we cam eto the shore, where the land fell down and the bridge began to rise, we stopped and watched her window sail slowly away, along the abstract arc of the bridge. "We could walk across the lake," I said. The thought was terrible. "It's too cold," Lucille replied. So she was done. Yet I remember her neither less nor differently than I remember others I have known better, and indeed I dream of her, and the dream is very like the event itself, except that in the dream the bridge pilings do not tremble so perilously under the weight of the train."
- Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
Exquisite. I didn't notice the title, but after reading a single sentence I still knew where it came from. Unlike many books, Robinson's prose stays with me. Throughout Housekeeping she returns again again to images of light and dark, of windows, and water.
Posted by: mary mccallum | October 14, 2008 at 03:17 AM
This is a great way to start the day. A humble request: please post other passages from time to time that you feel appropriate. It helps, inspires and brings a sense of encouragement to a simple writer like myself. Thank you, TEV.
Posted by: JW | October 14, 2008 at 08:17 AM
My apologies. Obviously you are posting passages.
Posted by: JW | October 14, 2008 at 08:20 AM
Thanks much for this. I read a review of her latest somewhat recentely, somewhere, and found it interesting, but not go out and get it interesting. This passage, a gorgeous passage, is getting it added to my long lists.
Posted by: P.T. Smith | October 14, 2008 at 08:21 AM
Beautiful passage. I agree with the others that request more once in a while.
Thanks,
Mike
Posted by: Mike | October 14, 2008 at 10:56 AM
What a delight to see anything by Robinson, but espcially something from her first novel. It is set in Sandpoint, Idaho, where I lived in another lifetime and where my grandfather was born.
The Long Bridge that goes across Lake Pend Oreille is one of those sights that features both nature and manmade works to great advantage.
This is a huge, deep and wide lake that rarely freezes over, that has depths not quite charted where submarine training took place during WWII but where kids learned to ice skate for decades, even after the ice didn't need to be harvested during winter for summer use.
Robinson's writing is so on the mark. I'm delighted her latest novel is on the National Book Award list.
Posted by: LW | October 16, 2008 at 07:44 PM