Elegiac is the perfect word for it!

It's a lovely quote too. I remember reading the novel and thinking, 'Holy shit, he's hit the nail on the head!'

I'd happily run a class on it. Whenever anyone asks for a reading list, it's often on there.

I take the novel as a mystic work, much like Meister Eckhart's works. It's a pendulum swing between the secular and the sacred.