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

11 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutrally, its action is a salutary one. Because we must also givean exterior destiny to the interior being. To accompanypsychoanalysis in this salutary action, we should have toundertake a topoanalysis of all the space that has invitedus to come out of ourselves.Emmenez.-moi, chemins! . • •(Carry me along, oh roads ... )wrote Marceline Desbordes.Valmore, recalling her nativeFlanders (Un ruisseau de la Sca1'pe).And what a dynamic, handsome object is a path! Howprecise the familiar hill paths remain for our muscularconsciousnessl A poet has expressed all this dynamism inone single line:0, mes chemins et leur cadenceJean Caubere, Deserts(Oh, my roads and their cadence.)When I relive dynamically the road that "climbed" thehill, I am quite sure that the road itself had muscles, orrather, counter-muscles. In my room in Paris, it is a goodexercise for me to think of the road in this way. As I writethis page, I feel freed of my duty to take a walk: I am sureof having gone out of my house.And indeed we should find countless intermediaries betweenreality and symbols if we gave things all the movementsthey suggest. George Sand, dreaming beside a pathof yellow sand, saw life flowing by. "What is more beautifulthan a road?" she wrote. "It is the symbol and theimage of an active, varied life." (Consuelo, vol. II, p. 116).Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his cross­ds, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a/surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreausaid that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul.And Jean Wahl once wrote:Le moutonnement des haiesC'est en mo; que je l'ai.