The Nest
GEORGES BUN
E
CCLESIASTic~s
says not to rely on a man without a nest. And,
actually, the nest is a good guarantee of bourgeois stability:
1
it offers
a reassuring image of life staked out, unaspiring, riveted in the
home,
dedicated to the duties which perpetuate the family. All the rectitude
of private life is concentrated here, and morality validates instinctual
demands. Unlike the hearth which joins its group together in the
observances of a cult, the nest, symbol of the secular community,
conjures up those legitimate pleasures of tenderness, comfort, and in–
timacy which still preserve some domestic modesty. Yet this picture
of the nest .as, at the same time, both warm and chaste is really little
more than an assumption, gilt-edged with hypocrisy, and, in practice,
the attempted symbiosis supports some hideous equivocations. What
one is hatching is one's own impurity.
Certainly those it shelters have a dangerous illusion of security.
The dense matting, the walls of tangled thicket, the impenetrable
wickerwork protect it sometimes: its slit mouth and its roof isolate it
and save it from the menaces of the sky. Also, its habitat, well off the
ground, high in the fork of a tree, enshrined among thorn bushes–
when these are not, as Chateaubriand says, simple "curtains of ver–
dure," drawn to insure the nest's privacy and natural modesty–
staves off any attack, even indiscreet inquiry. Sometimes, for camou–
flage, by a mimesis which goes further than cunning, certain birds re–
duce their nests to the plant state from which they have taken the
essential materials. And this very absence from danger is danger–
ous, for a nonchalance develops which is utterly alien to morality.
The nest is a rest home, whereas an ethical life is tense, uneasy,
chronically alert and sensitive to wrong. The person who no longer
feels the threat of danger, and stands no more on his guard, becomes
the victim of his inner demons. Furthermore, with the nest's guaran–
tee of security there is no real reason to work, and, safe behind the
-
1.
In fact,
nidus
is a cognate of
sideo:
the nest really is the place where
one settles down.
