THE NEST
- 51
One imagines all kinds of suspicioul! things in this anxiety to
escape from the open air. But then shady business usually goel! under–
ground. Depth, being the image of the superior protection, has acquired
an even worse reputation for itself than simple interiority: hell and
the cesspool are preferably located somewhere below the basement.
Intimacy is always erotic; the secret, guilty. What is hidden is vice.
The utility of the foiding screen. Immoral can be defined as whatever
escapes the eye. Shame hides from sight, from which one infers that
concealment has some cause for shame. Parents know very well that
children only disappear to make trouble. The man wandering at night
through the streets imagines, as he watches the light filter through
the closed shutters, that every obstacle masks an orgy, or, at least, some
illicit delight. And Baudelaire, in the
Fleurs du Mal,
describes the
shutters as the
abri des secretes luxures.
"Clandestine" s connotations of
guilt are a late development. What fine security there is for an
im–
propriety in a cushioned alcove with the curtains pulled! And what
impunity, what service to temptation the double lock and the
firm
door give! In places with a fastener on the door (bathhouses,
Rimbaud's w.c.'s, private rooms) one plays most readily with certain
suggestions. The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is charged with
sensuality, with the imagination of the
retreat.
And
it
is really its
obscurity which gives the nest a strange rankness. Crimes are plotted
in darkness, and if the den and the dark comer are exposed to broad
daylight, they lose their powers of defense.
Italian gives
morbido
a sense of gentlenesl!, noting thus that rela–
tions which are too delicate tend to encourage sick and troubled feel–
ings. On this account, one might guess that the nest, feathered and
furred, fleecy, downy, and silken, feminizes and destroys the moral
principles exposed to its cozy warmth. The moss, grasses, wadding,
soft fibers, gum, and sticky stems combine to increase whatever is soft
and gentle, as, indeed, the human nest, padded, fluffed, with hang–
ings, thick carpets, eiderdown bolsters, fringes, overstuffing, and furs
generates a voluptuous fever highly propitious to every disorder.
Surely you must agree that the nest is concocted so as to procure
a maximum of warmth. Otherwise, neither the germ of the egg
develops, nor can the brood, generally born naked, hope to survive.
But who thinks that morality weighs its decisions in the steamroom
or the Turkish bath? The morals of the hottest countries are, re–
putedly, the most relaxed. Winter is not Aphrodite's seMon, and there
has to be a certain temperature, say that of the bed, to promote an
