View source for User:Aitantv/Gaston Bachelard (1958) The Poetics of Space

* “Bachelard claims that every true poetic image breaks with linear clock time, introducing a dimension of verticality in depth and height.”
Bachelard maintains that the poetic instant is a “ harmonic relation between opposites”
* “For our house is our corner of the world”
* “In every dwelling, even the richest, the first task of the phenomenologist is to find the original shell” p26
* “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home” p27
* “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” (p28)
* “My bed is a small boat lost at sea; that sudden whistling is the wind in the sails. On every side the air is filled with the sound of furious klaxoning. I talk to myself to give myself cheer: there now your skiff is holding its own, you are safe in your stone boat. Sleep, in spite of the storm. Sleep in the storm. Sleep in your own courage, happy to be a man who is assailed by wind and wave” (p49)
* “Every image is a good one provided we know how to use it” (p49)
* “The room is dying honey and linden Where drawers opened in mourning The house blends with death In a mirror whose lustre is dimming.” (76 - Jean Bourdeillette, Les etoiles dans la main (Paris: Seghers), p 48
* “If we have retained an element of dream in our memories, if we have gone beyond merely assembling exact recollections, bit by bit the house that was lost in the mists of time will appear from out the shadow.” (78)
* “…there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.” (108)
* “He who buries a treasure buries himself with it. A secret is a grave, and it is not for nothing that a man who can be trusted with a secret boasts that he is “like the grave”

+ in the context of Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, in all it’s lush exposition of the intimacy of dwelling spaces, Bubble Tours is a stark meditation on the alienation and inhabitability of rationalised construction and property development methods.


* “If one can succeed in reliving this partial life, in the precision of a life that endows itself with a form, the being that posseses form dominates thousands of years. For every form retains life, and a fossil is not merely a being that once lived, but one that is still alive, asleep in its form. The shell is the most obvious example of a universal shell-oriented life.” (p 132)
* “In order to surpass one must first enlarge” 
* “In other words a snails shell, this house that grows with its inmate, is one of the marvels of the universe.”