The first book I read by Bachelard introduced me to a new philosophical, intellectual, and literary world. I was drawn to it immediately, although I struggled to understand all its elements and contents. I searched for more of his books, sayings, ideas, and views. I read more about phenomenology and its meaning for Bachelard, and how he applied it to what surrounds us, especially in this book.

Bachelard is one of the most important French philosophers, and some say he is the greatest phenomenological philosopher. His ideas are like important additions to the phenomenological philosophical corpus, especially within the scope of his work on place and his valuable and beautiful discoveries. Bachelard's exploration of place stopped to reveal to us not its actual existence, but its emotional beyond that is inscribed in our sensory and beautiful existences.

My advice to those like me, I mean beginners in reading philosophical books, is not to let the long introduction of the book stop you. What comes after it is the most beautiful. Let your imagination and your poetic spirit soar and enjoy all the new lights that Bachelard shines for you. Have a different relationship with the places around you.

The house is the body and the soul, and it is the first human world. Before "man is thrown into the world," as some metaphysical philosophers claim, he finds his place in the cradle of the house. And any precise metaphysics cannot ignore this simple truth because it is an important value that we always return to in our waking dreams. Existence has now become a value. Life begins dreamy, protected, and warm in the heart of the house.

Bachelard's journey begins from the house, from the cellar to the attic. "The house is our corner in the world. It is, as has been said repeatedly, our first being, our true being in every sense of the word." When we dream of the house in which we were born, and while we are in the depths of utmost relaxation, we are plunged into that original warmth, into that matter of our earthly paradise. This is the environment in which the protected human lives inside. We will return to the general features of the house. And here, incidentally, I want to emphasize the filling of the existence of the house with waking dreams that lead us to it. The poet knows well that the house holds childhood "between its arms," as Rilke says: "The house, a piece of the meadow, oh evening light, suddenly takes on a face that is almost human. You are extremely close to us, you embrace us and we embrace you."

The old house, for those who excel in description, is a geometric structure made of sounds. Where the sounds of the past seem different in the large room than in the small bedroom, and the sound of the call from above the stairs is different from both of them. The hardest memories, which are beyond any geometry that can be drawn, are our attempts to regain the quality of light, and then the winds that linger in the empty rooms and leave an evocative seal on each room of the house of memory. And we can regain not only the trace of the sound "those variable degrees of the beloved sounds that have now become silent" but also their vibrations in each room.

Then he moves on to the closets, the drawers, and the chests of clothes. "The chests with their lids, the desks with their drawers, and the chests with their decorated locks are real tools for our hidden spiritual lives. Without these things and their like, life loses the patterns of the infinite. And these things have the quality of the infinite like us, through us, and for us." In the closet, there is a central point of the system that protects the whole house from the chaos that has no regulator. Here, the system prevails, or rather, here the system rules. And the system is not just geometric relations but also the memory that preserves the history of the family. Memories come in a jumble when we see on the shelf of the closet the satin ribbons, and the pieces of natural silk, etc., placed on top of the heavy furniture. Milosz wrote: "The closet is filled with the chaos of the most precious memories." But the real closet is not just an ordinary piece of furniture. It does not open every day, and it is like the heart that does not reveal its secrets to any human being, for its key is not always in its door.

Regarding "nests," he says that it is not the task of phenomenology to describe nests as they are in nature, for that is the task of ornithology. The beginning of the philosophical phenomenology of nests lies in our ability to clarify the interest with which we look at an album containing pictures of nests, or more clearly, our ability to regain the gentle wonder that we felt when we found a nest. This takes us back to our childhood, or to the childhood that we should have had. "The tree that had the honor of hosting the nest was plunged into its joy. For the bird, the tree became a refuge." And so, when we inhabit a nest, we place ourselves in the source from which trust in the world springs, we receive the beginning of trust and a drive towards cosmic trust. Our house, perceived through its dreamlike possibilities, becomes a nest in the world. The experience of the duality of the world - and thus our defensive and offensive dreams - comes at a later time. For all of life in its first seeds is joyous. Existence begins with the joy of existence.

The shells. Charbonneau-Lassay wrote: "The shell with its hard enclosure and the moist living being inside it is a symbol of the ancients for man as body and soul. The ancients used the shell as a symbol of the human body that the soul surrounds with an outer covering, while the soul that animates the whole body is represented by the softness. And for this reason, they said that the body dies when the soul leaves it, like the shell that stops moving when the living being that lives inside it leaves it." And we know that the meaning of inhabiting the shell is to live in unity. The coexistence of this image means our acceptance of unity. Sometimes the image is negative, hardly visible, but it is nevertheless effective. It expresses the solitude of the self-sufficient human. And at other times, the image gains its strength from the resemblance of all the possibilities of rest, and every void becomes an infinite silent shell.

The elements. "Every corner in the house, every corner in the room, every niche in the secluded place that our hiding or self-sufficiency in it brings us back to, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination, that is, it is the germ of the room and the house."

The infinitely small. "The small things that we simply imagine lead us to the days of childhood, to the infinite with the maternal, to the truth of the maternal." "This apple, being small in itself, and its seed, which is warmer than its other parts, emits the warmth that preserves the universe. And this seed, in my opinion, is the small sun for this small world, which warms and nourishes the vegetative soul in this small mass."

The infinitely large. "Often, the inner expansion is what gives a true meaning to some of the expressions related to the visible world." "The forest was before me, before us, while for the fields and meadows, they are in accordance with my dreams and memories with the different stages of sowing and harvesting. When the dispute between the I and what is not - I becomes more flexible, I feel that the fields and meadows are with me, in my being, and with us. As for the forests, they dominate the past." "The spacious place is the friend of existence."

The phenomenology of management. "The images (of total management) help us to hold on, and allow us to add a primitive mood to ourselves, and to affirm our existence with warmth inside because when existence experiences itself from the inside and becomes empty of all external features, it becomes circular." "And for the dreamer of words, any peace that exists in a circular word. How much peace there is that touches the mouth and the lips, when the existence of breathing becomes circular."

A beautiful book... I think it's a great addition to my books this year... I read it with the Friday salon... https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... For those who want more... there you will find many quotations and discussions.

This was not fun at all.

I believe that part of the reason lies in the lack of focus that I had when approaching this. However, to be honest, I truly didn't enjoy it.

There was no sense of urgency throughout the book, and so much of it seemed to just meander along aimlessly without really saying anything of substance.

It is very clearly a product of a different era. I had initially hoped that it would offer a refreshing perspective, but instead, I found it deeply alienating.

I am disappointed because several authors whom I love and respect have spoken highly of this particular work. It just goes to show that everyone's taste in literature can vary so greatly.

Perhaps if I had come to this book with a different mindset or in a different stage of my life, I might have had a more positive experience. But as it stands, I cannot recommend it.

Is what the metaphysical philosophies have presented correct, that man (is cast in the world), is abased, left to wonder in a world that is clear in its hostility? Or is what we call (existence - there) not as dreamy as it is depicted to us, to the extent that it is a project for opening the inside to the outside, for containing the world instead of being lost in it?

Gaston Bachelard, as is clearly evident from the previous quote, strongly opposes what the existentialist philosophies inflate regarding the hostility of place, and even the isolation of place, where "I am the place where I find myself" (Novalis), and where "the place is in no place, it is inside, like honey in the cell" (Jean-Paul Sartre).. and where many poetic texts are used as documents for his research through following the phenomenological method in his book (The Poetics of Space).

"The philosophy that starts from the moment of "casting man into the world" is a secondary philosophy, it jumps over the primaries, and those, when existence was happy, when man was involved in happiness, and when happiness was related to existence."

It is a book that came to rephrase the relationship between what the philosophers of consciousness called (the self and what is not the self), where it denies the hostility of the world from a simple and extremely important fact: that man, at the beginning of his arrival in the world, is wrapped in a home, a home that pursues what he called "happiness" and then "existence", where "the home is our corner in the world, it is our being the first" as the world opens up in a thousand ways and makes the relationship between the personal and the cosmic impossible to something dear, or to say that the dialectic of the inside and the outside (existence and non-existence) appears through a series of hesitations, interactions, that go side by side towards removing the hostile intermediaries between the two, because the outside and the inside are both a thousand, and "the threshold is a sacred thing" (Borges), and everything moves towards its opposite, it is the dynamics of sacred love.

http://www.bothayna.net/home/index.ph...

Magical and inspiring, this concept is so appropriate for teachers as teaching truly revolves around creating space.

Here's what I penned in my blog www.kimhermanson.com regarding creating space in teaching.

Teaching, for me, is all about crafting deep, fertile environments for learning. In fact, I've come to realize that the ability to create rich space holds far greater significance than any subject matter expertise I might possess. So, if space is of such importance, why do we persist in focusing on the specifics - the subject, the facts, the "thing," rather than the environment we're cultivating for any given project or event?

The late philosopher Marshall McLuhan often differentiated between "figure" and "ground" in his writings. He stated that "The figure and ground together make up the totality of what is perceivable. However, perception is centered on the figure. The figure is what seems structured, like the foreground, while the ground appears unstructured and as the background. The boundary between the two seems to belong to the figure, which is why the figure has a shape and the ground appears shapeless."

Since our left brains have a penchant for naming and categorizing things, they lead us to focus on the figure, and we typically disregard the background as unimportant. In art, the ground is termed "negative space," and experienced artists understand that it's just as crucial as the object being drawn. Betty Edwards wrote in "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain": "...the negative spaces...demand the same level of attention and care as the positive forms. Beginning students generally pour all their attention onto the objects, persons, or forms in their drawings and then sort of 'fill in the background.' It might seem难以置信 at this moment, but if care and attention are lavished on the negative spaces, the forms will take care of themselves."

This is most definitely true in teaching - the negative space or "ground" is far more vital than the specifics of what's occurring at any particular moment. As Eckhart Tolle wrote, the "Now" isn't what's happening at the moment, but rather, the Now is the space in which whatever is happening, occurs. That's the realm of teachers. What an astonishing job we have.

Reading this book took weeks.

Every day, after reading a short text from the book, I tried to savor what I had read. That is, I paid attention to living that text. That is, I let my imagination grow. Until I had somehow become what the visionary imagination had said. If I felt that I had failed to understand the text, I would not read a new text the next day! Instead, I repeated the text from the previous day over and over again.

It was beautiful, creative, and inspiring.

I'm sad that it's over. I never feel good about finishing a book that I love.

Thoroughly enjoyable.

On the one hand, I have this sense that I could extract even more from this book as I continue to build a more solid philosophical foundation and expand my vocabulary. However, on the other hand, one has to wonder if you truly need all that in order to fully appreciate the vivid images that Bachelard conjures up.

Although the cover and title might give you a different impression, this book isn't really about houses in the traditional sense. Instead, it delves deeply into poetic images and daydreams. Trying to summarize Bachelard's school of thought on this topic would be an impossible task. The reader is constantly being reminded not to over-philosophize or psychoanalyze these poetic images. What can be said about Bachelard is that he is a curious and joyous daydreamer. He has the courage to let his mind roam freely, more so than most people, especially scientists and philosophers.

Bachelard attempts to give voice to imaginative thoughts and the implicit poetic meanings that are associated with materials, places, and concepts that most people can only sense but struggle to express. He does this not through his own words alone but by drawing on images from existing poems. I have never come across a more vivid explanation of what it feels like to be secluded in an attic, breathing in the dusty air, protected under a roof, with the doors securely locked. These are experiences that I previously believed could only be felt intuitively. But Bachelard manages to bring them to life through poetry, thereby explaining the inexplicable and making the reader a companion in his daydreams. He is fully aware that one cannot explain away the feeling of "roundness" or "immensity" through psychoanalysis or empiricism. Instead, he attempts to find the answers to these questions through the phenomenology of poetic images.

Definitely not a book for the skeptical or practical-minded. If you can't tap into the romantic poet within yourself and imagine an apartment in a busy city at night as a boat on a stormy sea, or an apple seed as a core that emits warmth and life, then it might be best to skip this one. Or perhaps I'm wrong, and this book could be even more crucial for you.

A phenomenologist approaches the image in a unique way.

He takes the image exactly as it is, precisely as the poet has crafted it. Then, he endeavors to make it his own, to savor this rare and precious fruit. He pushes the image to the furthest reaches of his imagination.

No matter how distant he may be from being a poet himself, he attempts to replicate its creation for himself and, if feasible, carry on with its exaggeration.

This book, too, should be treated in a similar manner. It should be picked up, appreciated, and relished.

We should approach it with the same sense of wonder and curiosity as the phenomenologist does with the image.

We should strive to make it our own, to explore its depths and extract all the nourishment it has to offer.

By doing so, we can truly understand and value the beauty and significance that lies within the book.

Imagine you're magically transported back to your first home. You know - the one you lived in as an infant. Eureka... suddenly the mists of time and faulty memory withdraw, and it all comes back to you! Every nook and cranny, every secret, mystical corner, each minute detail of your home and of the enthralled childhood you once enjoyed would flood your heart with a forgotten, Elysial joy. I used to retain a vivid and unmistakable memory of lying in bed as an infant in a dark, warm room and hearing the ominous and mysterious double booms - first low-pitched, then even lower - of a nearby fog horn. But I was born in inland Michigan, nowhere near the ocean!

As a teenager I used to think “I CAN’T have just dreamed that up!” I used to remember it when listening to Beethoven, for some strange reason. Why, for Pete’s sake? Well, much later, I was reminded by my Mom that we had lived in Big Sur on the coast of California when I was one year old, where my Dad worked as a biologist at Hopkins Marine Station - we had lived, in fact, near Steinbeck’s own Cannery Row. And of course, she always wanted me to have a good grounding in classical music. Toscanini was her hero! As a mathematics major at Stanford, she learned to love the pure linear clarity and strength of the classical sounds he elicited from the NBC Orchestra.

Beethoven was ALWAYS playing in the later background in my childhood, too, as every so often Dad’s starting pay as a scientist would allow him to splurge on a new Toscanini 33RPM record for her from Frieman’s, where she worked part-time. Wow! I had had a sensory key given to me - just as Proust was given the grace of a little cake of Madeleine to permit an instant of exact recall. 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. No wonder! We, as infants, were COMPLETELY DIFFERENT than who we are now. And, our world was completely, utterly, magically Alive!

Plato would have said we were then Closer to the Source. And that is the essence of this fantastic book. At least as I envisaged it back in the dreamscapes of my uni Freshman Year. “Time it was, oh what a time it was... I have a photograph - “ Paul Simon was right. Now even the photo has faded. But the song Bachelard inspired my heart to sing hasn’t! Yes, for Céline Dion is right too. The heart DOES go on. Our dreams live in a time beyond time. And Bachelard, though I know him now to be a post-structuralist following in the drily rational footsteps of Levi-Strauss, inspired a remarkable heart-felt memory in an 18-year-old kid’s unawakened soul, that lives on - long after the usual “rance nuit de la peau” anointed me - for I am now a lot more careful than Mallarme’s Punished Clown.

Though I certainly was just that, at first. 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. And it is through those New Eyes of the Spirit that I see clearly the veracity of my teenaged vision. And the memory itself of it all is Alive in a world of timelessness beyond me. “The soul that rises with us, our Life’s Star, has had elsewhere (and far away from here) its setting!” Long before my earliest memories. And Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, like mine at 18, found their proper dénouement in the Faith of my Fathers. A quite unremarkable conclusion to his and my remarkably tumultuous lives. And all the Intimations I needed were right here, in this book. And so, if you can - buy, beg, borrow or steal it, if you’re a wide-eyed Dreamer like I was! You’ll love it.

No me canso de releer este libro.

It is truly a work of great brilliance.

Every time I pick it up, I am immersed in its captivating world.

The story unfolds in a way that keeps me on the edge of my seat, filled with excitement and anticipation.

The characters are so vividly portrayed that I feel as if I know them personally.

Their emotions and experiences resonate with me deeply.

The author's writing style is masterful, with beautiful prose and engaging dialogue.

It makes me want to keep turning the pages, eager to discover what lies ahead.

This book has become a favorite of mine, and I will continue to read it again and again, savoring every moment.

It is a literary gem that I highly recommend to anyone who loves a good story.

Here is my ancient forest.

It is a place filled with mystery and wonder.

The tall trees seem to reach up to the sky, their branches intertwined like a complex web.

The sunlight filters through the leaves, creating dappled patterns on the forest floor.

The air is fresh and filled with the sweet scent of nature.

As I walk through this forest, I can hear the sounds of birds chirping and insects buzzing.

It is a symphony of life that has been playing for centuries.

The forest is also home to many different animals, each with its own unique story.

Some are hidden deep within the underbrush, while others can be seen scampering across the forest floor.

My ancient forest is a place of beauty and tranquility, a place that I will always cherish.

It is a reminder of the power and majesty of nature, and a source of inspiration for my writing.

All the rest - literature.

It is through my words that I hope to capture the essence of this wonderful place and share it with the world.

I read this work as an introduction to phenomenology.

The writing within it is truly beautiful, and I especially loved the poetry that Bachelard employs to convey his points. It was a really enjoyable and fun read.

After reading this, you truly do develop a greater appreciation for the space around you. Although I had a great deal more enjoyment from the poetics than from the writing about space, this experience has made me eager to read more poetry in the future rather than delving deeper into phenomenology.

It's interesting how a single piece of literature can have such an impact on one's interests and perspectives.

The combination of the beautiful language and the unique use of poetry really made this a memorable read.

I'm looking forward to exploring more works that incorporate poetry in a similar way and seeing where this newfound interest takes me.

Overall, this introduction to phenomenology has been a thought-provoking and inspiring experience.

I'm not a philosophy girl. I've never really been into deep thinking and profound ideas. But, I've been promised that this particular thing will change my life. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'm willing to give it a try.

Regardless of the outcome, I have to admit that this has been the best cold weather nighttime read. As I curl up under the covers with a warm blanket, this book has been keeping me company and transporting me to another world.

The words on the page seem to come alive, and I find myself getting lost in the story. It's a welcome escape from the cold and the darkness outside.

Maybe this will indeed change my life, or maybe it will just be a pleasant diversion. Either way, I'm enjoying the journey and looking forward to seeing where it takes me.