Housekeeping

from Marilynne Robinson's extraordinary novel Housekeeping, p. 194:

There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse them and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit on porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.


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