Gaston Bachelard 'The Poetics of Space' - WordPress.com

xxxviii introductionwhat we imagine before what we know, what we dream beforewhat we verify, all wardrobes are full.At times when we believe we are studying something, weare only being receptive to a kind of day-dreaming. Thetwo chapters that I devoted to nests and shells--the tworefuges of vertebrates and invertebrates-bear witness to anactivity of the imagination which is hardly curbed by thereality of objects. During my lengthy meditation upon theimagination of the four elements, I re-lived countless aerialor aquatic day-dreams, according to whether I followed thepoets into the nest in the tree, or into the sort of animalcave that is constituted by a shell. Sometimes, even when Itouch things, I still dream of an element.After having followed the day-dreams of inhabiting theseuninhabitable places, I returned to images that, in orderfor us to live them, require us to become very small, as innests and shells. Indeed, in our houses we have nooks andcomers in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curlup belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit,and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit withintensity. In this respect, we have within ourselves an entireassortment of images and recollections that we wouldnot readily disclose. No doubt, a psychoanalyst, who desiredto systematize these images of comforting retreat, couldfurnish numerous documents. All I had at my disposal wereliterary ones. I thus wrote a short chapter on "nooks andcorners," and was surprised myself to see that importantwriters gave literary dignity to these psychological documents.After all these chapters devoted to intimate space, Iwanted to see what the dialectics of large and small offeredfor a poetics of space, how, in exterior space, the imaginationbenefited from the relativity of size, without the helpof ideas and, as it were, quite naturally. I have put thedialectics of small and large under the signs of miniatureand immensity, but these two chapters are. not as antitheticalas might be supposed. In both cases, small and largeare not to be seized in their objectivity, since, in this presentwork, I only deal with them as the two poles of a projection