Bachelard: The Poetics of Space
Images give logos to perception.
One must be receptive to the image, the image the moment it appears.
P17 very interesting.
In reliving a past moment for art or poetry you transform the image.
The image is no longer a simple substitute for reality, instead it is now another kind, an enriched image which stimulates the consciousness.
The imagination is the faculty of producing images.
When we are lecturing, we become animated by the joy of teaching and, at times, our words think for us. But to write a book requires really serious reflection.
The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams.
Each one of its nooks and crannies was a resting-place for daydreaming.
Childhood is certainly greater than reality.
It is a good thing, it is even salutary, for a child to have periods of boredom, for him to learn to know the dialectics of exaggerated play and causeless, pure boredom.
Boredom is the “very germ of all freedom”??
To read poetry is essentially to daydream.
There is a rationality to the roof. It gives mankind shelter from the rain and sun he fears.
Up near the roof all our thoughts are clear.
As for the cellar, we will no doubt find uses for it. But it is the foremost dark entity of the house, the one that partakes in subterranean forces.
When we dream in the cellar, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.
The unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle with it when it goes to the cellar and sees shadows dancing on the walls, even though civilized electricity lights the whole cellar.
Every good book should be re read as soon as it it finished.
After the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading.
When insomnia, which is the philosopher’s ailment, is increased through irritation caused by city noises, I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean.
The big city becomes a clamorous sea.
If the hum of cars becomes more painful, I do my best to recover it in the roll of thunder, of a thunder that speaks to me and scolds me.
I dream an abstract daydream. My bed is a small boat lost at sea. On every side the air is filled with the sound of furious klaxoning. I talk to myself to give myself a cheer: there now, your skiff is holding its own, you are safe in your stone boat.
Sleep, in spite of the storm. Sleep in your own courage, happy to be a man who is assailed by wind and wave.
And I fall asleep, lulled by the noise of Paris. (49)
It is a salutary thing to naturalize sound to make it less hostile.
Any image is a good one, provided we know how to use it.
A hermit’s hut - the essence of the verb “to inhabit”
The hut is centralized solitude. The hermit is alone before God.
A hut possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the many glories of poverty; as destitution increases it gives us an access to absolute refuge.
Great images are a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly.
Every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which personal past adds special color.
There is increased intimacy in the house as it is besieged by winter.
A reminder of winter strengthens the happiness of inhabiting.
A reminder of winter increases the house’s value as a place to live in.
Sounds lend color to space.
The absence of sound leaves space pure and, in the silence, we are seized with the sensation of something vast and deep and boundless.
There is nothing like silence to suggest unlimited space.
All aggression is of animal origin.
In the tiniest hatred there are animal filaments.
P77 interesting.
Memories are encumbered with facts. Beyond the recollections we continually hark back to, we want to relive our suppressed impressions and the dreams that made us believe in happiness.
“Where did I lose you, my trampled fantasies?”
An excellent exercise for the function of inhabiting the dream house is taking a train trip.
Such a voyage unreels a film of houses without ever being tempted to stop.
We are sunk daydreaming with all verification healthily forbidden.
The dream house must possess every virtue.
However spacious, it must have the intimate heart of a nest, of a chrysalis.
A house’s welcome is so genuine that even what may be seen from the windows belongs to it.
“The body of a mountain hesitates before my window:
How can one enter if one is the mountain,
If one is tall, with boulders and stones,
A piece of Earth, altered by Sky?”
P86
How can housework be made into a creative activity?
Consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to everyday action.
The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to a mechanical gesture, or practice phenomenology while polishing a piece of old furniture.
When a poet rubs a piece of furniture—when he puts a little fragrant wax on his table with the woolen cloth that lends warmth to everything it touches, he creates a new object; he increases the object’s human dignity; he registers the object officially as a member of the human household.
And what charm it confers upon our memories to be able to say to ourselves that, except for suede gloves, we have lived moments similar to those lived by Rilke!
Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness.
If he is happy he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations.
In the domain of values a key closes more often than it opens, whereas the doorknob opens more often than it closes. And the gesture of closing is always sharper and firmer than that of opening.
To put just anything, in any way, in just any piece of furniture, is the mark of unusual weakness in the function of inhabiting.
The imagination sharpens all of our senses. The imagining attention prepared our attention for instantaneousness.
Interesting: there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box.
To verify images kills them.
It is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.
Well-being takes us back to the primitiveness of refuge.
“The well-being I feel, seated in front of my fire, while bad weather rages out-of-doors, is entirely animal. A rat in its hole, a rabbit in its burrow, cows in the stable, must all feel the same contentment that I feel.”
At my paris apartment, when my neighbor drives nails into the wall at an undue hour, I “naturalize” the noise by imagining that I am at my house in Dijon, where I have a garden. And finding everything I hear quite natural, I say to myself: “That’s my woodpecker at work in the acacia tree.”
This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturb me.
An image of the immense sky resting on the immense earth:
“The air is a dove which, as it rests on its nest, keeps its young warm.”