The Poetics of Space

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Kearney, Richard (2014). "Introduction". The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-310752-1. I had the usual rough worldly Baptism by Fire, but I burned only as long as did the mythical Phoenix, rising out of the ashes to the New Life of the Spirit. He compares a home to a nest or a shell. By this, he means that a house is, symbolically, the place where life is created and also where it takes shelter.

This new edition features a foreword by Mark Z. Danielewski, whose bestselling novel House of Leavesdrew inspiration from Bachelard’s writings, and an introduction by internationally renowned philosopher Richard Kearney who explains the book’s enduring importance and its role within Bachelard’s remarkable career. For this wonderful French philosopher, when we learn to inhabit a house, we also learn to inhabit our inner world. The spaces of a house are part of us, just as we are a part of them. Wittgenstein says "About what one can not speak, one must remain silent." Of course, as a philosopher, he was right. But what is unspeakable is also exactly where poets must venture forth a primitive utterance. Not to fill it up brashly with idle talk, but to consecrate it with voices which will increase the silence. This is why phenomenology as practiced by Bachelard, though a branch of philosophy, is more akin to poetry. He whispers to you everything you've always known, intimate knowledge that we all share wordlessly, yet he increases its mystery by speaking about it in a hush of clarity that does not defile the subject matter as psychologists, philosophers, or psychoanalysts do. It makes sense then

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It is in the expressions of humanity that Bachelard seeks his resonances with the physical world. Language is the beginning of all things human, the starting point where truths emerge from silence, therefore anything expressed contains a kernel of truth, and a kernel of humanity. It is in response to silence that words, and therefore humanity, takes form. Silence is far more abundant than language, but even small amounts of language contain more than silence. This type of interchange between man and world is pursued by Bachelard through countless aspects of inhabiting the world, expanded and expounded into regions as diverse as hermetic huts, corners, the composition of shells and bird’s nests in the animal world, the “miniaturization” of fairy tales, the dialogue between inside and outside beings, immensity and diminution, the “warm” properties of curves and the “cold” properties of sharp angles, the “roundness of being”. Stilgoe, John R. (1994). "Foreword to the 1994 edition". The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-6473-3. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of the motionless man.” And you know, these epiphanies can lead us down a wonderful rabbit hole - just like Alice - into an enchanted land that almost seems... well, make-believe.

calm. From being imagined, calm becomes an emergence of being. It is like a value that dominates, in spite of minor states of being, in spite of a disturbed world." Novelist Penelope Lively would have loved that; she collected ammonites, not for the transcendental curves but because they housed her memories.Ricœur, Paul (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-02189-5. Danielewski, Mark Z. (2014). "Foreword". The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-310752-1.