50
PARTISAN REVIEW
walls, one cultivates a taste for idleness and dreams: but morality is
no friend of frank inertia, and is not even acquainted with. the gra–
tuitous.
Really secure people lose the faculty of self-observation; they
do not "keep their distance"; they behave cynically to each other,
that is, as if they were alone. Within this restricted group, cut
off from the outside world by a wall as thick as a prison's, one
acts before an audience of objects, any sense of other observers
having disappeared. For the others, not being possible enemies, cease
to play the judge, or even the spectator--one not only removes one's
mask before them, but even forgets they are people: one identifies
them by their function or by their place. At home, deportment and
self-control are laid aside; one imagines that one has devoured one's
relations' liberty and one mechanically treats them as permanent
acquisitions, that is, in the possessive case. Outdoors, one keeps a
sharp lookout; one keeps an eye on oneself, too, but inside the four
walls which bound and protect the human nest, one drops the vigilance
which safeguards purity: the Spirit lives only in the
qui-vive.
The nest is safe only because it is so self-contained. Whether
shaped as a cup or a funnel, a basin or a dome, a ball or a horn, it
always assumes a circular (or spherical) form, and geometrically con–
fers, by its concentric system, the advantages as well as the incon–
venience of an absolute interiority. Nothing healthy can penetrate
from the outside, nothing corrupt can escape from within. It is no
mistake to think that the interior is more polluted than its shell, its
camouflages or the open field. Outside the wind, the rain, the sun
sweep, wash, dry the impurities. But the nest, so perfectly enclosed,
asphyxiates, poisons itself. Shut and closed, it smells its own confine–
ment. Its fastness oppresses as much as it protects, and those who
live there, lost in feathers and down, barely escape suffocation.
When an egg breaks, or a nestling dies, and there is no way to
get them out, the rest of the brood has to grow up in this in–
fected atmosphere. Then, too, according to the medieval Spanish
romance, the bird often fouls her own nest. The wasp, the hoopee,
the turtledove, the goldfinch never hesitate to ease themselves at home.
Vultures store rodents and rotten fish in their aeries, where worms
and obstinate weevils wrangle over them. Vermin are very fond of
a warm brood. And sometimes it looks as if the nest likes to distin–
guish itself by certain odors of excrement, make a name for itself
with its festering cup.
