Throughout Housekeeping we see Ruth describing how dreams can mix with reality. I found this idea fascinating because it's true that with time moments become memories which bare likeness to dreams and are ultimately buried so deeply in our consciences that it's difficult to tell the two apart. Some of my earliest memories make no sense at all and it's impossible for me to explain how they ended up in my mental timeline.
For example, I've always remembered encountering a bear when I was about two or so, and for years after that, I would scold my mother for not having protected me. My parents promise me that there never was a bear, and yet I can picture it perfectly in my mind. As I grew older, I realized it very well may have been a dream, but as a child, it made little difference to me as I slipped from sleep to being awake with little differentiation.
Ruth specifically touches upon the irrelevance of fact at the end of the book:
All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation. For example, I pass again and again behind my grandmother's house, and never get off at the station and walk back to see if it is still the same house, altered perhaps by the repairs the fires made necessary, or if it is a new house built on the old site. I would like to see the people who live there. Seeing them would expel poor Lucille, who has, in my mind, waited there in a fury of righteousness, cleansing and polishing, all these years. She thinks she hears someone on the walk, and hurries to open the door, too eager to wait for the bell....Sometimes she dreams that we come walking up the road in our billowing raincoats, hunched against the cold, talking together in words she cannot quite understand.
All this that Ruth imagines about Lucille is significant in its own right. These details she can picture, although without factual evidence, are woven from what she knows of her sister and are part of how she perceives her past as well as her present. Interestingly enough, mixing memories with dreams and imaginings seems almost contrary to Sylvie's philosophy of living in the moment. But then again, to live every second to its fullest, isn't it imperative that we mix in our past and future? Some of the best moments taste sweeter with a memory associated with it or an aspiration that you're working toward.
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ReplyDeleteand the end of this post is compelling, bro!
Without dwelling, we know the past is part of the present,
and the thought of the future is undoubtedly pleasant.
The trick is to balance complacency and urgency,
to appreciate life even faced with emergency.
Also (sorry, done rhyming), I looooove those passages about dreams and reality and Lucille's imagined story near the end of the book. They implicitly illustrate the importance of fiction in our lives, like Sylvie does with her stories about people she's met ("known"). They may or may not be true, but does it really matter?
In another way, the book blurs the line between fiction and life by getting us to notice metaphors for transience in our own lives. The other day I was burning a candle and the flame went out and it ended up just a little pile of wax and a wick in the glass soda bottle I'd used as a makeshift candle holder. I actually gasped a little at how perfectly it illustrated the transience of life--the flame was out and the form of the candle was gone. This usually has no significance, but in the context of the book--in the context of *fiction*, where everything tends to have meaning--things like this start to take on meaning.
This is something I absolutely take from the book. Whether or not our lives do have significance, fiction can serve the purpose of making it seem meaningful--the purpose that religion serves for some people. Living in the present (as Sylvie does) does not mean being a nihilist, but being attentive and passionate with regard to life. It's a wise way to live, I think.
Good post! :D
At one point, Ruth refers to her (and Lucille, still, but not for long) as "entering Sylvie's dream." I see what you mean about the dream/memory blur being sort of contrary to Sylvie's present-minded way of living, but for Ruth, Sylvie seems to inhabit a perennial dream state--the familiar world inflected by the peculiarities of an individual consciousness. When Ruth and Sylvie cross the bridge at the end, they kind of do enter another realm, like a dream world--they exist parallel to the rest of us, but somehow invisible, off the grid, "dead" as far as official records go. Lucille remains in waking life, and they are "ghosts" who are present because of their absence.
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