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

15 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the huthigh step. The house's entire being would open up, faithfulto our own being. We would push the door that creakswith the same gesture, we would find our way in the darkto the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remainedin our hands.The successive houses in which we have lived have nodoubt made our gestures commonplace. But we are verysurprised, when we return to the old house, after an odysseyof many years, to find that the most delicate gestures, theearliest gestures suddenly come alive, are still faultless. Inshort, the house we were born in has engraved within usthe hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We arethe diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particularhouse, and all the other houses are but variations on afundamental theme. The word habit is too worn a wordto express this passionate liaison of our bodies, which donot forget, with an unforgettable house.But this area of detailed recollections that are easily retainedbecause of the names of things and people we knewin the first house, can be studied by means of general psychology.Memories of dreams, however, which only poeticmeditation can help us to recapture, are more confused,less clearly drawn. The great function of poetry is to giveus back the situations of our dreams. The house we wereborn in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also anembodiment of dreams. Each one of its nooks and cornerswas a resting-place for daydreaming. And often the restingplaceparticularized the daydream. Our habits of a particulardaydream were acquired there. The house, the bedroom,the garret in which we were alone, furnished the frameworkfor an interminable dream, one that poetry alone,through the creation of a poetic work, could succeed inachieving completely. If we give their function of shelterfor dreams to all of these places of retreat, we may say, asI pointed out in an earlier work,1 that there exists for eachone of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, thatis lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past. I calledthis oneiric house the crypt of the house that we were born1 La terre et les rveries du "epos, p. 98. Corti. Paris.