Marilynne Robinson reflects upon society, homes and housekeeping:
. . . . I must say too how beautiful human society seems to me, especially in those attenuated forms so characteristic of the West--isolated towns and single houses which sometimes offer only the merest, barest amenities: light, warmth, supper, familiarity. We have colonized a hostile planet, and we must stanch every opening where cold and dark might pour through and destroy the false climates we make, the tiny simulations of forgotten seasons beside the Euphrates or Eden.
At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which taken together, make the world salubrious, savory and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental. It is the sad tendency of domesticity--as of piety--to contract and of grace to decay into rigor and peace into tedium. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), p. 93.]
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