The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

When I return to dream in the attics of yester-year, I never go down again.

to naturalize sound in order to make it less hostile.

“There is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimited space. Sounds lend color to space, and confer a sort of sound body upon it. But absence of sound leaves it quite pure and, in the silence, we are seized with the sensation of something vast and deep and boundless.

Victor Hugo’s Les Djinns.

all aggression, whether it come from man or from the world, is of animal origin. However subtle, however indirect, hidden or contrived a human act of aggression may be, it reveals an origin that is unredeemed. In the tiniest of hatreds, there is a little, live, animal filament. And the poet-psychologist—or the psychologist-poet, if such a one exists—cannot go wrong in marking the different types of aggression with an animal cry. It is also a terrible trait of men that they should be incapable of understanding the forces of the universe intuitively, otherwise than in terms of a psychology of wrath.

Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

Sometimes