Untitled - Centre for Comparative Literature - University of Toronto

imagined them during the “original impulse” of youth. Primal images, simple
engravings are but so many invitations to start imagining again. (Bachelard 33)
Poetry re-opens the doors of our childhood home and allows us to visit the
same place as a different person. It does not crudely bring us back to the
time of our childhood, producing a naïve nostalgia, but instead connects the
past and the present, creating an entirely new, and enriched experience.
The home is a uniting force for the psyche, providing an individual with a space
that travels with the individual long after he has left his childhood home.
Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through
the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul.
It is the human being’s fi rst world. Before he is “cast into the world,”
as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the
house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle. A
concrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, all the
more, since this fact is a value, an important value, to which we return in
our daydreaming. Being is already a value. Life begins well, it begins
enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house. (Bachelard 7)
The memories that the individual holds closest, the ones that he or she bothers to carry around
throughout his or her life are not necessarily represented by snapshots of the Grand Canyon
or an “I heart NYC” keychain. Instead, the memories which unite the individual are those of
his or her fi rst intimate space, protective like a cradle and “warm in the bosom of the house.”
When we travel, we carry our spaces with us, transporting the feel of home
wherever we go. Whether we have just moved into a new home or are staying in a hotel,
the places we inhabit take on the quality of home through the forces of the daydream. As
Bachelard states: “An entire past comes to dwell in a new house” (5). While MacCannell
believes that the traveler is always looking to escape his intimate surroundings because he
does not believe that there is authenticity to be found in his home, Bachelard would assert
that this traveler cannot help but carry some part of his home with him wherever he goes.
Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and
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