Behind 'Highland imaginings'--which does not say who is doing the imagining--there is a history of physical and social desolation, a chronology of anti-ecological attitudes which do not root living beings in their oikos, but
unhouse them.
This vision of vacancy or privation culminates in what is, on the surface, the darkest or bleakest moment in the novel, a moment in which Ruth senses that Sylvie has also abandoned her, and that eventually it will become dark: "Let them come
unhouse me now of this flesh, and pry this house apart.
"To provide more theoretical housing," Sinclair writes, "it is necessary to
unhouse those who have already fended for themselves." Extant mini-societies are uprooted, Sinclair suggests, replaced by housing developments offering the very "community" that has just been destroyed.
unhouse the poet from his quotidian fussings to a time/space from which