User:Luni/The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, 1958

Read a house, read a room. How do I write a house?

Anthropocosmic - relating to human kind and cosmos.

"We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection." p28

"... if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day­ dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." p.28

"Now my aim is clear: I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. " p.28

"Through poems, perhaps more than through recollections, we touch the ultimate poetic depth of the space of the house." p.28

"In order to analyse our being in the hierarchy of an ontology, or to psychoanalyse our unconscious entrenched in primitive abodes, i t would be necessary, on the margin of normal psychoanalysis, to de­ socialize our important memories, and attain to the plane of the daydreams that we used to have in the places iden­tified with our solitude. For investigations of this kind, day­ dreams are more useful than dreams. They show moreover that daydreams can be very different from dreams." p.30

"all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. " p.31