Housekeeping

I am cleaning out my house. I have lived here since 1993, moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a number of reasons. I was unwilling to fight for a school placement. Our block had gone from being a nice sleepy heroin block to a crack block zinging with gun fire and drama. We were under threat of our rent-stabilized place becoming a co-op. Honestly though, none of those were more than excuses. The real reason is private. But also, I was thinking about other things.

We spent no time looking and bought the first house that came our way. It was on a busy street with no sense of neighborhood and it was very small, and though we have always wanted something bigger, on a quiet street, with kids around, we never moved. We are smart about real estate just not our own. We have never had enough money to get what we want, the market has always been a few hundred thousand ahead of what we can afford. And we don’t care that much. I want above all to look at water. Short of that, I’ll adapt to anything.

For many years we did housey things, but half-heartedly—we would rather have been doing something else. Maybe we waited too long to move out of the city and became apartment dwellers to the core. During the pandemic young families moved in on either side of us, making us “that nice older couple,” and we smile as we observe them work in their yards. How nice. How over it we are.

I like to read articles about fall chores, winterizing, and spring cleaning, but I don’t follow the steps. It’s like reading a travel article about a place I’ll never visit. Mr. Dark is likewise interested only in a few necessities. We never spend our Saturdays working on the house or washing the car. We stay at our desks, cogitating.

Meanwhile I have accumulated lots of stuff. For a long time I had a strong compulsion toward documentation and saved evidence that I’d been here and there, or that babies had been born and weddings celebrated. I saved all my letters starting when I was ten. Trunks full. I saved photos and books and scarves and ticket stubs. Don’t even ask about Christmas cards and postcards. I have L.L. Bean tote bags (my preferred storage system) packed with these papers. I have my grandparents furniture and silver. My mothers wedding china.

I don’t want any of this stuff anymore. Whatever I was trying to understand by keeping these totems or however I was trying to pin myself to life has come and gone. I want to get down to thirty things only. We’ll see how it goes.

During this project I taught Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson to my craft class. I had read it before a few times but forgot how trippy and deeply disturbing it is. I love writers who really know their Bible and make fiction out of their interpretation. I once read that one of the changes Jesus’s teachings brought to the ancient world was that death isn’t the end. Not heaven…something more like the continued presence of souls all around us. Housekeeping manages to people the world with both those presently housed in bodies and the unhoused who remain around, or under, or above.

Here is a paragraph that scared one of my students so much he was reluctant to read more:

Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls on the eye is an 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 the 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. Say my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent on other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among the flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent. While it was dark, despite Lucille’s pacing and whistling, and despite what must have been dreams (since even Sylvie came to haunt me), it seemed to me that there need not be relics, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace. If only the darkness could be perfect and permanent.

I understand why my student was scared, but I take this as encouragement to keep up with the dissolution of my collected evidence of mattering. Housekeeping is a book of great genius and truly a wild ride. I can’t wait to read it again after I’ve forgotten enough to be shocked freshly. It’s a great ghost story, a great Western, a great theological exegesis, a great yarn. I also find it very funny. If I ever get a tattoo, it will read DARKNESS IS THE ONLY SOLVENT. It seems appropriate; it too will dissolve.

Kirkus review of Housekeeping 1980

Paris Review Interview