Chapter 3.I: drawers, chests and wardrobes
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, transl. Maria Jolas
To begin with, all words do an honest job in our everyday language, and not even the most ordinary among them, those that are attached to the most commonplace realities, lose their poetic possibilities as a result of this fact.
Chapter 3.I: drawers, chests and wardrobes The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, transl. Maria Jolas When the house is happy, soft smoke rises in gay rings above the roof.
Chapter 2.X: house and universe The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, transl. Maria Jolas There is also the courage of the writer who braves the kind of censorship that forbids "insignificant" confidences. But what a joy reading is, when we recognize the importance of these insignificant things, when we can add our own personal daydreams to the "insignificant" recollections of the author! Then insignificance becomes the sign of extreme sensitivity to the intimate meanings that establish spiritual understanding between writer and reader.
Chapter 2.IX: house and universe The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, transl. Maria Jolas We should find ourselves indulging in similar daydreams if we started musing under the cone-shaped roof of a windmill. We should sense its terrestrial nature, and imagine it to be a primitive hut stuck together with mud, firmly set on the ground in order to resist the wind. Then, in an immense synthesis, we should dream at the same time of a winged house that whines at the slightest breeze and refines the energies of the wind. Millers, who are wind thieves, make good flour from storms.
Chapter 2.VIII: house and universe The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, transl. Maria Jolas The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little bed chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound. Among the most difficult memories, well beyond any geometry that can be drawn, we must recapture the quality of the light; then come the sweet smells that linger in the empty rooms, setting an aerial seal on each room in the house of memory. Still farther it is possible to recover not merely the timbre of the voices...but also the resonance of each room in the sound house. In this extreme tenuousness of memory, only poets may be expected to furnish us with documents of a subtly psychological nature.
Chapter 2.VII: house and universe The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, transl. Maria Jolas |
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