The author, Vanauken, or Van, pulls his car onto the side of the road by a set of stone gateposts in the middle of the night. He gets out of the car and begins walking up the long drive toward a currently dried-up lily pond, where he stops by a wooden bridge, staring further into the property toward a darkened house. The place is Glenmerle, his childhood home where his parents lived until his father’s death. As he stands by the bridge in the dark, he reminisces about his past, his fondest and most formative memories, and all the people with whom he shared a life at his family’s estate.

He pictured the inside of the house, “always merry with people” (14), the makeup of his childhood bedroom, and the trees that made up the entrance to the woods that he had explored as a boy. Even as a young boy, he had been enchanted by the woods and they had been his first experience of beauty, a certain “nameless something that had stopped his heart” (16). In addition, it was his experience of beauty—joined with the code of honor he developed as a young man—that pushed him to vow to experience all that life had to offer, “he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths” (18) of the joy and the pain that life had to offer.