AFTER HIS WIFE DIED, Mr. Derdon was very anxious to get into her bedroom, to have a look around on his own with the door closed and with no one there to watch him and wonder how he was feeling. It was not anxiety or grief or any painful sensation, not longing or yearning or anything like that, that drew him to the room, but curiosity. He wanted to look at it. The room, that had hardly existed for him while she was alive, and that he had seldom entered, although he had occasionally stood in the doorway or at least paused in the doorway to call something in to her on his way out of the house — the room now seemed mysterious to him the way an empty house will suddenly seem mysterious and even frightening to children who never noticed it when it was occupied, and the way a bird’s nest lying empty on the ground after a summer storm will crowd the mind with thoughts that have nothing to do with wings and food and warmth and song: thoughts of vacancy, and thoughts of winter, and of winds that are too violent and nights that are too dark, and thoughts of stony solitude, endured in silence, and of landscapes that are too cold and flat and where no one cares to walk. The little nest, cast to the ground, contains an emptiness that is too big for us to understand. We cannot imagine how it must feel. It is a limitless emptiness, and beyond us, although we would like to be able to understand it, and examine it from all angles, and mark its limits, and bring it under control, and then put it away in a comfortable place and forget about it. But the nest is nothing, no more than a scrap. The empty nest is only a brazen image of the fear that is so commonplace that we cannot merely walk through it every day pretending we do not notice it but can walk through it and pretend it is not there. As long as the nest is there empty, we look into it, but then it is gone and we think no more about it.