Beneath the young white poplar at the top of the stairs, there was nothing, just as we had suspected. In 1974, the American writer Donald Barthelme published a short essay entitled, "Nothing a Preliminary Account". In it, Barthelme writes, "Heidigger suggests that 'Nothing nothings'--a calm sensible idea with which Sartre, among others, disagrees. (What Heidigger thinks about nothing is not nothing.) Heidigger points us toward dread. Having borrowed a cup of dread from Kierkegaard, he spills it, and in the spreading steain he finds (like a tea-leaf reader) Nothing."

To Poison Pie and myself, it seems quite plausible that such a thing could have been written beneath a tree like this one, in the middle of a nowhere at the top of stairs like these.