**"The Beauty of the Place"**

For the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, when a philosopher of science steps out of his shell and observes a world dominated by his habits, forgetting that all the matter he engages with still has an obscure technical distance that requires a refined philosophy highlighting its technicality and enriching its materiality in turn. This material distance exists within us, but its growth stops after the initial shock that accompanied our acquaintance and encounter with it for the first time. Bachelard, with his critical eye, dual sensory understanding, and impulse for philosophical interpretation, shows us the reason for the shift in his scientific-philosophical orientation towards the imaginary through his book "A Psychoanalytic Study of Fire," which led him towards the realm of the imaginary. One can imagine how much simplicity Bachelard needed here to move from the harsh reality to the pure imaginary without stripping away the simplicity of its importance. This philosopher had a unique vision, perception, and (sensory and intellectual) awareness.

" The only necessary quality to become a philosopher is to be astonished." Jostein Gaarder, a Sufi scholar. "But before a child is able to speak properly – and before he learns to think in a philosophical way – the world becomes ordinary." Jostein Gaarder, a Sufi scholar. The astonishment at inventing the phone is one thing, but the astonishment of mine, yours, and thousands of people when we make the first call, reaching a world that we can't see but doesn't deny its reality that we overcome to enter an imaginary world based on the reality of matter, those astonishments deserve to be stopped. They are the beginning of the journey from (fear and astonishment) to enter any new experience.

Neither the scientific-philosophical research based on a recognized philosophical basis and principle nor the philosophical meditation will enable us to reach the philosophy of poetry and art. Their ontological philosophy, in essence, like the poem and the poetic image, needs a space like that of a poem where it can burst forth and assert its unique identity abstracted from its charm that is not subject to causality. The new poetic image, our poetic image, is not the repetition of a poem but the return of its own self and the hesitation of its unconscious creation.

"The poets speak at the threshold of being." Bachelard means that they are the ones who sense the holiness of being, respect just the indulgence in being, and ignite it to obtain their own selves, so to speak. "The poet does not give me the past of his image, but this image germinates within me." Bachelard. "Poetry is more the manifestation of the soul than the manifestation of the intellect." Bachelard. "Poets and painters are naturally manifestations." Van den Berg. Bachelard encourages us to read all the poetry in existences and their beauty, introduces us to different types of readers, and determines the reason for their differences and superiority. There are psychologists, psychoanalysts, critics, ordinary readers, and phenomenal readers. He tells us about the difference in the focus of phenomenality around art and poetry. Art is one of the arts that satisfies our self and moves in a beautiful space where our expectations are exceeded, and it is a phenomenal space easy to understand compared to poetry, which is governed by the forgetting of knowledge to the same extent as knowledge (forgetting in poetry is a fundamental state). Few are the poetic images that are freed from our unconscious as soon as they are born, and most of them we forget before we translate them on paper.
The philosophy of art that the phenomenal Bachelard builds is based on highlighting the beautiful spatial value. Because if one lacks spatiality, one lacks one's identity and authenticity. The spatiality of a poetic text or a work of art is its essence, and who among us does not desire to preserve our essence? Bachelard's phenomenality is a development of the traditional phenomenality of "the philosopher Edmund Husserl," which is satisfied with the subject as a formal imaginary limited to the external engineering of the idea of the subject (consciousness), and this differs from Bachelard's phenomenality. Bachelard's phenomenality goes beyond the idea to live the original material imaginary of being to form a creative experience and consciousness that a simple consciousness cannot grasp. The original material imaginary is governed by fear (for example, the shape of a shell, its engineering is externally controlled, it is skillfully made by nature in a way that (despite its diversity, its engineering cannot be disputed / freely for accuracy), and here one may be satisfied with the observed engineering of the shell, and in this example, Husserl's philosophy is revealed. The outside, like all outsides, still argues with the inside. If we think that the soft parts inside the shell are what form the shell with its beauty and protection of the dwelling as a (primary philosophy), then the fear that it endures from the cosmic outside (secondary philosophy) will be a pain. Here, Bachelard focuses on the primary existential philosophy with (the positivity of the warm dwelling of the creature), objecting to the negative existential idea that says that we / encounter negatives in being, in a hostile world. And the hostile here is derived from enmity, and the hostile as a concept is consuming and does not deserve us to appropriate our existence with it. Bachelard's phenomenality makes man a field for analyzing matter, not the other way around. The beautiful values that man can endow life with rise above all matters with his imagination. It is a hierarchical pattern to which the values of matters are subject, regardless of proving or disproving their existence, to reach their essence beyond the matters to be independent in themselves as (beautiful values) of the philosophy of the arts.
Man, with the poetic faculty of his mental body, overcomes (the position of the subject) with all his consciousness to live with the imagination that the value of the subject leads him to. Here, he breaks the boundaries of the self and the non-self. The imagination that Bachelard aims for, like a dream of awakening, is not unconscious! Rather, it is the combination and marriage of consciousness and the unconscious. << A rough example, I hope my conclusion is accurate << God Almighty creates souls in a state of unconsciousness and retrieves them when their term ends also from a state of unconsciousness as a soul. Here, the body is limited as a (unique application) to the state of consciousness (the existence of consciousness here as a soul and body is a simple consciousness in its simplest states). The world around us is full of matters "Rilke's companions in being" when we are satisfied with the traditional reading of the external engineering of matters as a phenomenon worthy of meditation, while we are traditional phenomenologists. While going beyond reading and delving into it (the stage of suspending reading, which is like the influx of the intertwined imagination with any reading) makes our simple consciousness a dreaming and creative consciousness that is awake and attentive to the beautiful values according to the power of our imagination that consciousness cannot suppress and determine its boundaries. In the stage when our consciousness, with the help of passing through the state of suspending reading only, we marry between our consciousness and the unconscious (the inspiring gap), and this is something that not everyone can do, only a few whom we call the working poets without their material accessories and their poetic importance, living the poetic images and renewing them to build an independent personal poetic image that carries our genes so that we own them and perhaps surpass the poem itself from which the poetic image emerged. The question is whether this new unconscious state of inspiration is independent in itself from the old spiritual unconscious that preceded our integration with the body... as it is relatively separate from the consciousness of the body? Is it reasonable that the poet, in his inspiration and in his submission to his immediate consciousness, is inspired by his unconscious as a dormant soul that was waiting for a body << This leads me to explore and think about the logical meaning of inspiration and whether inspiration falls under the category of indoctrination and whether man, in the measure that God has drawn for him, does not exceed being a small inspiring spiritual gap? Far from the superficiality of the issue of the eternal and the ephemeral, there is a deeper issue and its focus is the solidity of the subject for me, which is the issue of perception with its seriality. The light of inner perception may not imitate or mimic what is around it as Bachelard points out, but its submission breaks the rod of obedience to the familiar. Its submission in itself is a cosmic mystery! (I did not find a clear answer in the book that created a lot of questions inside me).
Schopenhauer: "The world is my imagination." "The house is our corner in this world, it is our first being." The corner of the furnished house is the warm common interior and the cradle of thousands with its colors and harmonious sounds, and it rules us with its permanence around us, and it is located in its entirety opposite the spherical cosmic father who rotates around the spherical house around us... So how can we end such a world with enmity! There is an obscure resistance between the inside and the outside, the real house and the world, and our accusation of the world of being full of enmity is nothing but the result of our ignorance of it like a second nightmare, its enmity is expected and postponed. We, only when we realize the essence of the thing and its truth with the flexibility within our power to turn around us to observe the world in the way of our original animal that is hidden behind all our development and the return of its actions, we are afraid, we tremble, we lament, and we meditate.
The beauty in the corner of the house as a concept is a beauty that separates being from non-being, so it is in essence an imaginary being, and it comes from being a shelter, protection, and safety. In it, we find the pleasure of our existence and the maturity of our actions, and it is not necessary for us to practice - happiness - in the tranquility of this corner, for it is just a simple answer to the concept of beauty! So we may practice our worship or meditation or even lament our failure or our misfortune - only - as he always did, and when his parents asked him: Why do you always cry? He answers them from his corner: I always cry because there are always tears.
The poetic image in its originality is like all images, it is static, but on the other hand, it must drive our actions into motion, otherwise we would be slaves to its stillness. We drive it with a harmonious reading from us towards motion and magnification, we give it names emphasizing its characteristics so that it wakes up as a naked being that follows the cosmic expanse, narrowing its own suspended image without relying on the previous knowledge that will repeat itself in its footsteps, but with its terrifying and reassuring inspiration far from any cultural development. If reality is magnified in the imagination, then the empty desert cannot be imagined positively without its negativity, for it is contradictory in the imagination, both victorious and terrifying. The reality of the desert is an independent speaking in / a film / and the infinite greatness cannot give us the impression of the background desert on the set, for example. This spoils the sharpness of the mind and kills the imagination! When Leonardo da Vinci advises painters who have lost inspiration to look at a crack in the wall, he realizes that the power of imagination exceeds the infinite in smallness and the infinite in greatness beyond their physical limits and their real and effective intersection, which is only a demand for the beauty of involvement in their being.
Dreams of awakening that are expressed through our existence remain even if we strive, and they do not need academic explanations and a logical pattern. They may be scary for those who try to interpret and deal with their exceptions, turning their difficult psychological analysis into a retreat to the dreamer and avoidance of the dream itself. These, Bachelard calls them "those who interpret the flower with ashes." They may misinterpret the dreams of many poets, thinkers, and others. We must go beyond the position and live the positions of the position.
"Writing is like magic: it is not enough to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but it must be done with complete grace and a pleasant way." Isabelle de Charrière. The writer and translator Ghaleb Halsa added a lot to the second edition of this book, for like Bachelard, he believes that spatiality is essential, and he hopes that Arabic spatiality will be independent in the space of literary works in itself and determine its essence by focusing on the beauty of Arabic spatiality that spreads from our imagination as soon as we move away from reality, like the beauty of the mosque and the minaret.
Ten exciting and difficult-to-understand chapters capable of shaking your critical ability and cutting off any measure of consciousness that you will try to use for help. So when you are in the sea of Bachelard's philosophy and its waves crashing into you, it is worth using help, for / you / are a sinking ship and there is no escape. The chapters: 1 - The house from the cave to the attic (the symbolism of the cocoon). 2 - The house and the world. 3 - The drawers and boxes and closets for clothes. 4 - The curtains. 5 - The shells. 6 - The corners. 7 - The infinite in smallness. 8 - The thousand infinities in greatness. 9 - The debate between the inside and the outside. 10 - The phenomenality of management.
A book that I would have liked to read before...!.. "Man is a half-open being." Bachelard.

DNF, that seemingly endless and often boring game, can sometimes lead to the most unexpected philosophical jumbles.

Take the statement "a house is a poem. a poem is a house." At first glance, it might seem like a strange play on words. But upon closer inspection, there is a certain truth to it.

A house is more than just a physical structure. It can hold memories, emotions, and a sense of identity. In a way, it can be a work of art, much like a poem.

Conversely, a poem can create a vivid image in the reader's mind, a place that they can inhabit and explore. It can be a mental "house" of sorts.

So, perhaps we do "get it" after all. DNF, with its repetitive gameplay and sometimes mind-numbing grind, can still inspire us to think about the deeper meanings and connections in life.

Who would have thought that a simple video game could lead to such profound philosophical musings?

If you exist in space, this one's for you.

Space is an extremely vast and mysterious realm. It is a place where the rules of our earthly world may not apply.

In space, you would experience weightlessness, which can be both thrilling and challenging. You would be able to float freely, performing acrobatic maneuvers that are impossible on Earth.

The view from space is simply breathtaking. You would see the beauty of our planet Earth from a distance, as well as the countless stars and galaxies that fill the universe.

However, living in space also comes with its own set of difficulties. You would have to deal with the harsh environment, including radiation and micrometeoroids. You would also need to rely on advanced technology to survive and carry out your daily activities.

Despite the challenges, the exploration of space continues to fascinate and inspire us. It is a frontier that holds great promise for the future of humanity.

So, if you exist in space, know that you are part of an amazing adventure, and that the eyes of the world are watching you.

I’m not entirely certain that I absorbed a vast amount of knowledge about space, yet being in Bachelard’s presence was an absolute DELIGHT.

He is a gentle and dreamy old man. He has the ability to see the soft glow of flowers and a luminous haze of floating gold-dust that seems to cover everything.

Like a child, he perceives fairies and tiny people, and senses things that elude the perception of others, filling him with unbridled glee.

I mean, just take a look at this guy.

As he himself said, “…in order to devote myself to this miniaturized metaphysics with a clear conscience, I should need the increased support of additional texts. Otherwise, by confessing my love of miniature, I should be afraid of confirming the diagnosis suggested, some twenty-five years ago, by my old friend Mme. Favez-Boutonier, who told me that my Lilliputian hallucinations were characteristic of alcoholism.”

His words add an interesting layer to his already captivating persona.

Being with him is like stepping into a world of wonder and imagination, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

It makes me realize that there is so much more to the world than what meets the eye, and that sometimes, the most beautiful things are the ones that only a few can see.

Four stars - but a very influential four stars indeed.

Bachelard's palpable delight in the power of poetic images is truly contagious. His work has a certain charm that draws the reader in and makes them eager to explore the depths of his ideas.

This is a book that doesn't reveal all its secrets at once. Instead, it unfolds gradually within the reader over time. It's the kind of book that one anticipates returning to in the coming years, knowing that each rereading will bring new insights and a deeper understanding.

However, it's not without its flaws. Bachelard's early/mid-20th century fascination with psychology and psychoanalysis can be seen as the primary weakness of this work. At times, it seems to overshadow the beauty and simplicity of his poetic vision.

My Book's Title and Its Brief Summary... It details that the book is related to the science of social life... about the beauty of the elements of life and place and their impact on humans and vice versa.... But in reality, it is a purely philosophical book that specializes in analyzing the poetic expressions that are subject to possibilities and interpreting these writings as a kind of waking dreams (imagination) that are inspired by the souls of possibilities and memories and focus on the abode of the letter and the warmth in it, in addition to the interaction of readers with it... all of that in an unusual philosophical way because it does not rely only on reason, logic, and psychological analysis, but also on the soul and imagination in its approach to the expression, the author, and the reader (philosophy of imagination and metaphysics).

It talks about the traditional house (basement - earth - first floor - roof) and the philosophical connotations of each of them and about the apartments.... about the house with roots and the one without roots.... the tower of the lighthouse and the new tower... about the contrast between the hut and the palace.... the grass and the rock.... the infinites in the large and the small.... the smell and the sound of things in the expression.. the power of the word... the inside and the outside... the circular life.

The book contains several important and beautiful insights that I liked, such as (houses with roots - the beauty of the hut - some descriptions of the grass - detachment and indifference to the world - the degree - philosophers live on the ground floor because it is logical while poets fly to the roof and dive into the basement - the curve and the angle - the evening lamp....) supported by wonderful world literary texts, but it was boring for me in many passages related to the analysis, perhaps because of its use of dry and complex philosophical terms and the excessive depth in every idea to the extent that I read the last 3 chapters very quickly, skipping some paragraphs... also, the book contains 3 very long introductions.

The translation is good but by no means simple.

The really worthwhile intellectual work, I think, lies in the introduction and the first two chapters.

These sections establish the critical instruments of topoanalysis and the justifications for the various claims that Bachelard is making regarding poetic images, metaphor, phenomenology, and so on.

Later, when he closely examines specific spaces, he relies so much on the intuitive and the metaphorically inherent. For example, the cottage is described as cosy and nestlike, drawers and chests are seen as embodiments of secrecy, and the dialectics of outside and inside are presented as a dialectical interplay of outside and inside, and so forth.

As a result, the later chapters can sometimes seem more like mere lists of demonstrative examples taken from (mostly French) literary texts. Moreover, all the dreamlike prose and layered density can feel a bit frustrating because the outcome often appears to take these spatial metaphors not much further than our intuitions about them.

This makes one wonder if there could have been a more in-depth exploration and analysis to truly expand and deepen our understanding of these concepts.

Truly: protect books from their readers. Bachelard describes different corners of a hypothetical house, generously dozing off pages with images from beloved books, while not without blatant sexism (that is, literally: oh, how wonderful it is to observe how a woman takes care of the house!), fallomorphism addressed to Baudelaire and other French poets, and attacks on psychoanalysts and other profanes. Parallelly, there is a metaphor in contrast to the image (the guy really doesn't understand their interconnections and considers the metaphor a sign of stereotypical thinking, although literally THE WHOLE BOOK IS BUILT ON THE METAPHOR).

At the same time, the author doesn't say anything fundamentally new about the image of the house. The house is coziness, the casket is something precious; thank you, man, without a trillion references to little-known artists and philosophers, we would never have guessed all this, of course.

And when Bachelard starts telling about the beauty of the spiral as a natural form and literally yelling "How good it is to be alone and twirl the spiral", one wants to hand him a volume of Junji Ito and walk off into the sunset. Far away from the enthusiastic readers who cover up the emptiness with enthusiasm.

Bachelard's 'Poetics' offers nothing new in terms of philosophical insight or logical exposition.

It is decidedly unoriginal in its portrayal of concepts, associations, and representation. The book fails to bring a new angle or vista on the dynamics of the house in all its permutations, such as nest, shell, miniature (doll's house), and accessories (wardrobe, chests, drawers, locked pendants, etc).

Moreover, Bachelard continuously irked me with his well-meaning but frankly idiotic stances. I can forgive his patronizing attitude towards the housewife and her pleasure in polishing objects (pg 68). However, when he attacks my beloved metaphor and relegates it to the compost heap because he believes the only truth is 'image' and a metaphor is a corrosive influence, I am shocked.

When he states that values alter facts, I realize that this whole phenomenology business has gone too far. His cult idolization of Bergson probably contributes to this.

Clearly, this is my personal phenomenological interpretation of the book. Others who are new to the concept of a house/dwelling/physical space acquiring anthropomorphic features and functioning as an extension of, or a repository of, stream of consciousness, memory, and image memes might find this book interesting.

But while Bachelard fails to impress with science, he sucks you in in other ways. He is so genuine, full of joie de vivre, enthusiastic, and unassuming about the topic of home, which provokes a feel-good factor and makes one stop and contemplate.

Bachelard may not be saying anything new, but the way he says it is mesmerizing. He interweaves bits of poetry and art, shows a zest for living that is无与伦比, and breaks down my cynicism. Undertaking Proustian journeys down memory lane, he evokes images of fairy tale cottages and feelings of security and happiness. Each line he writes is filled with the wonder of a man who stops to smell the flowers and rediscovers the meaning in life in that infinitely small gesture. How can I not be seduced?

I've never truly made up my mind about how I actually feel regarding this text.

On one hand, a part of me is well aware that it's complete nonsense. It seems to lack any real substance or logical coherence.

However, on the other hand, there's another part of me that has this strange desire to believe in it and somehow enjoy the absurd, almost quasi-academic Frenchness that it exudes.

Maybe, just maybe, these two seemingly opposing feelings aren't actually mutually exclusive.

It could be possible to simultaneously recognize the text's flaws while still finding some strange allure or entertainment value in it.

After all, sometimes the most unexpected and outlandish things can have a certain charm that draws us in, even if we know deep down that they don't make much sense.

So, for now, I'll continue to grapple with these conflicting emotions and see where this exploration of the text takes me.

There is nothing that can describe this book. It's true that I'm sad because I wasn't able to write a review for it, but at the same time I'm convinced that I couldn't have written a review that would do it justice or capture its ideas, because I simply didn't fully understand all of its ideas as I felt them and touched my heart and affected my soul. I never imagined that anyone could talk about houses and places and their details and their relationship to the universe around them with such depth and beauty, so that the simplest details turn into meanings of astonishing breadth.

I hope to read the book again with a greater understanding but with the same enjoyable and delightful sense of wonder that accompanied me throughout its reading.

And as long as I won't be able to convey all of its quotes that amazed me, I'm sharing this post that I published on Facebook in celebration of it on the 9th of June:

During my reading of "The Man with the Long Shadow", I was struck by a word about happy childhood and its important role in achieving a balanced psychological and social life. After that, I chose a book that I thought was very far from what "The Man with the Long Shadow" talked about, a book called "The Teachers of Despair" about thinkers and philosophers and atheists in Europe. And I must have noticed - even before the author attributed the reasons that drive a person to become an atheist - that the first thing common among atheists is their sad and miserable childhood between unequal parents and sometimes rejecting the existence of their child. Then, after finishing the book whose stories ended in a desperate and heavy way for the soul, I decided to choose a completely different book, a book that talks about beauty, for example? I chose "The Aesthetics of Place", which was introduced with a lot of conditions, but what I never expected was this strange focus of the author on the feeling of places and their analysis starting from the childhood home in particular. He pays a great deal of attention to the houses where we spent our childhood and where we began our dreams that woke us up and made them a fundamental reference for what all the houses and roads we will encounter in our lives represent for us. I will never be able to talk about this book as it should be. Sometimes I feel that I don't understand many ideas, but still I feel them deeply and with pleasure. I stop at almost every idea and read it again and mark the page (until almost all the pages of the book are marked), then I stop reading and reflect on my own thoughts and memories related to what the author is saying. I'm amazed that the things that I thought about and saw are always more effective than everything else and I don't know how to explain to people how effective and warm and attached to our skin and intertwined with the cells of our brain they are. I'm amazed that these things that are imagined in people's eyes as simple and ordinary and not worthy of being told are now a subject of thinking, meditation and analysis by a famous philosopher like "Gaston Bachelard".

I'm grateful that a thin thread stretching from the day of the holiday until today gathers words, ideas and deep views about childhood that amaze me, make me happy and fill me with a thousand loves. I'm grateful that my readings that I chose randomly are arranged in this way despite my ignorance, weakness and laziness. I'm grateful to everyone who talked about a beautiful book, recommended it to us and advised us to read it. Thanks be to God, Lord of the Worlds.

The sweet book is truly a blessing.

I do absolutely love this book, and it has truly become a kind of manifesto for me in many aspects. The reason I haven't awarded it the full 5 stars is simply that a significant third of the writing remains essentially incomprehensible to me, even after numerous rereadings. The parts that do work are truly wonderful, but I still struggle to make sense of phenomenology in general and a great deal of this book in particular. However, what is remarkable about it is that one doesn't need to understand most of it to derive a great deal of pleasure from the best parts. Forgive me if this sounds either lazy or willfully ignorant, but I don't feel the need to pretend that I can fully grasp everything he said, especially in translation. I firmly believe that the book is enhanced, not diminished, by the fact that the most beautiful and elegant passages he presents stand on their own so completely.

What I cherish the most is the way he manages to penetrate the essence of a whole range of feelings. It's the kind of evocative atmosphere of childhood spaces, the home of the heart, the house protected from the storm, the nooks and crannies, and the shelves. What I love the most is his deep curiosity about how these feelings come into being and precisely what characterizes them. Instead of dissecting them with a scalpel (and thus ruining them), he employs fragments of poetry to create what feels to me like a kind of net to capture the living, breathing experience. In other words, rather than attempting to immobilize intimate space like a dead butterfly in a box, he gently evokes and opens it, holding it up to the light like a soap bubble, allowing us to truly study how the wings shimmer and radiate.

I finished reading the book with the sense that I had an intuitive understanding of what he meant, rather than an exact explanation. This was truly astonishing - to have a feeling of having learned from experiencing something in tandem with the author. There is a strong current of "oh my goodness, that's exactly how it feels" that runs through the text for me. In the end, what I find most remarkable is simply that Bachelard manages to bring you so precisely into a shared world of experience. It's the gift of knowing that someone else not only understands but also shares your feelings about certain spaces on a level that goes far beyond words.

This book remains a fundamental text for me as an artist, above all else, to remind me of the profound, wild, and beautiful ways in which certain spaces make people feel, and to gently prevent me from forgetting that it is possible to create a shared poetic experience without being even the slightest bit didactic. It's quite striking how clearly Bachelard loves his subject matter and how precious and meaningful it is to him. It's rare and refreshing to see a philosopher write with such grace and a sense of wonder and delight. He doesn't care if you understand the jargon of phenomenology; he just wants you to feel at home. It's a lovely invitation.

Also, anyone who loves Charles Baudelaire must read it. His section on "intimate immensity" in Baudelaire's poems is simply beautiful.