The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

He values the imagination because he recognizes that understanding without imagination is doctrine without growth. And without growth, what chance is there to engage the complexity that bounds us?

the reader of poems is asked to consider an image not as an object and even less as the substitute for an object, but to seize its specific reality.

The exuberance and depth of a poem are always phenomena of the resonance-reverberation doublet.

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer. When the page we have just read is too near perfection, our modesty suppresses this desire. But it reappears, nevertheless.

In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost.

To speak well is part of living well. The poetic image is an emergence from language, it is always a little above the language of signification. By living the poems we read, we have then the salutary experience of emerging.

“Poets and painters are born phenomenonologists.” And noting that things “speak” to us and that, as a result of this fact, if we give this language its full value, we have a contact with things, Van den Berg adds: “We are continually living a solution of problems that reflection can not hope to solve.”

“There is no poetry without absolute creation.”

Even in an art like painting, which bears witness to a skill, the important successes take place independently of skill.

In a study of the painting of Charles Lapicque, by Jean Lescure, we read: “Although his work gives evidence of wide culture and knowledge of all the dynamic expressions of space, they are not applied, they are not made into recipes . . . Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge. This is the price that must be paid for an oeuvre to be, at all times, a sort of pure beginning, which makes its creation an exercise in freedom.”

Art, then, is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.

“An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates.”

For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.

and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being.

At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability—a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to “suspend” its flight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.

There does not exist a real intimacy that is repellent. All the spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction.

Over-picturesqueness in a house can conceal its intimacy. This is also true in life.

And when it is a poet speaking, the reader’s soul reverberates;

How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of all freedom!

To read poetry is essentially to daydream.

But every good book should be re-read as soon as it is finished. After the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading. We must then know the problem that confronted the author. The second, then the third reading . . . give us, little by little, the solution of this problem.

Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly. Indeed, every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special color.

impression that the stars in heaven come to live on earth, that the houses of men form earthly constellations.

This image of solitude symbolized by a single light moves the poet’s heart in so personal a way that it isolates him from his companions. Speaking of this group of three friends,

everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate.

This man, who comes of gentle, happy people, must cultivate courage in order to confront a world that is harsh, indigent and cold.

And what is underlining but engraving while we write?

Metaphor is related to a psychic being from which it differs.

The world would get along better if pots and covers could always stay together.

The imagination can never say: was that all, for there is always more than meets the eye.

an image that issues from the imagination is not subject to verification by reality.

But when the poet closes the casket, inside it, he sets a nocturnal world into motion

To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.

To enter into the domain of the superlative, we must leave the positive for the imaginary. We must listen to poets.

An empty nest found belatedly in the woods in winter mocks the finder.

I tremble at having caused it to tremble.

Today, I am happy, because some birds have built a nest in my garden.

The experience of the hostility of the world—and consequently, our dreams of defense and aggressiveness—comes much later. In its germinal form, therefore, all of life is well-being. Being starts with well-being.

A creature that hides and “withdraws into its shell” is preparing a “way out.” This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent.

The shell is the most obvious example of a universal shell-oriented life.

I am moreover convinced that the human psyche contains nothing that is insignificant.

When we recall the hours we have spent in our corners, we remember above all silence, the silence of our thoughts.

For novelists often return to an invented childhood which has not been experienced to recount events whose naïveté is also invented.

One can undoubtedly become aware of existing by escaping from space.

here, in this corner, between the chest and the fireplace, “you find countless remedies for boredom, and an infinite number of things that deserve to occupy your mind for all time: the musty odor of the minutes of three centuries ago; the secret meaning of the hieroglyphics in fly-dung; the triumphal arch of that mouse-hole; the frayed tapestry against which your round, bony back is lolling; the gnawing noise of your heels on the marble; the powdery sound of your sneeze . . . and finally, the soul of all this old dust from corners forgotten by brooms.”

A gloomy life, or a gloomy person, marks an entire universe with more than just a pervading coloration. Even things become crystallizations of sadness, regret or nostalgia.

If we were to give the imagination its due in the philosophical systems of the universe, we should find, at their very source, an adjective. Indeed, to those who want to find the essence of a world philosophy, one could give the following advice—look for its adjective.

But if we “listen” to the design of things, we encounter an angle, a trap detains the dreamer: Mais il y a des angles d’où l’on ne peut plus sortir. (But there are angles from which one cannot escape.) Yet even in this prison, there is peace. In these angles and corners, the dreamer would appear to enjoy the repose that divides being and non-being. He is the being of an unreality. Only an event can cast him out.