Rose’s epigraph to Love’s Work—“Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”—is taken from the sayings of the Russian monk Staretz Silouan, and is glossed several times within the text. There is, for example, “the unhappiness of one who refuses to dwell in hell, and who lives, therefore, in the most static despair.” There is the moment when Rose describes herself as unhappy in love and refusing all consolation, including “the endlessly inventive love of my sisters.” “Keep your mind in hell and...” she says, without completing the sentence. Alternative healing, with what Rose regards as its fake spirituality, is said to offer a “counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell.”