SOURCE: Toles, George. “‘Sighs Too Deep for Words’: Mysteries of Need in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.” Arizona Quarterly 47, no. 4 (winter 1991): 137-56.

In the following essay, Toles addresses problematic aspects of language and artistic expression while examining Robinson's approach toward questions of being, nature, and transcendence in Housekeeping.

For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent position of repose.

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience

In chapter 8 of Marilynne Robinson's novel, Housekeeping, the young narrator Ruth accompanies her aunt Sylvie on a frigid, early morning journey by rowboat to a “secret” place in the valley. Their destination is an abandoned homestead, which includes a “stunted orchard and lilacs and stone doorstep and fallen house, all white with a...