Ken's Reviews > The Poetics of Space

Odd bedfellows, I suppose, but in The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard marries philosophy to poetry, quoting all manner of poetic lines in support of his arguments. For the most part, the poetry he cites is not that great, but in his defense he could not just scan the poetry world for great lines, he had to scan it for pieces that support his philosophical feints in the following chaptered categories:

1. The House from Cellar to Garret (The Significance of the Hut)
2. House and Universe
3. Drawers, Chests, and Wardrobes
4. Shells
5. Corners
6. Miniature
7. Intimate Immensity
8. The Dialectics of Outside and Inside
9. The Phenomenology of Roundness

See what I mean? Space. Starting with the one we all go back to our daydreams -- our childhood homes. For lucky ones like me, it's a refuge of happiness, a place I go not only in DAYdreams but many nighttime ones as well. For others, who perhaps had unpleasant childhoods, the house of their dreams undergo reconstruction, post and beam, until the daydream is as they like it (or as it should have been).

Some quotes work out nicely. Rilke is often cited. Here's one I kind of liked:

"Oh night without objects. Oh window muffled on the outside, oh, doors carefully closed; customs that have come down from times long past, transmitted, verified, never entirely understood. Oh silence in the stairwell, silence in the adjoining rooms, silence up there, on the ceiling. Oh mother, oh one and only you, who faced all this silence, when I was a child."

Make your way through all the "oh's" and you see there's something to this, especially with the introduction of the mother who, only now, the speaker realizes saw the gentle childhood home in different ways.

Thoughtful, deep, slow trekking, but worthwhile. I'd stop for weird things and say, "Hmn. That's true," like when he talked about bird nests and how a tree with a nest was set apart because of it in our minds -- not just any tree, but a tree more special than all the others in our yard because it had been selected (blessed) by birds who constantly returned to it just like we return to childhood homes in our daydreams.