To dream about space is an enchanting experience, and it is precisely here that my profound love for phenomenology took root.

At the level of the poetic image, the duality of subject and object呈现出五彩斑斓、闪烁不定的状态, constantly engaged in inversions. In this realm of the poet's creation of the poetic image, if one has the courage to assert, phenomenology is a microscopic phenomenology. The image, in its simplicity, requires no erudition. It belongs to a naïve consciousness, and in its expression, it is the language of youth. The poet, with the novelty of his images, is always the wellspring of language. To precisely define what a phenomenology of the image can be, to stipulate that the image precedes thought, we would have to state that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul. Then, we would have to gather documentation on the subject of the dreaming consciousness.

To dream wide awake is to embark on a journey with Bachelard. (He also affectionately led me to Rilke.) His works open up a world of profound insights and激发了 my imagination, allowing me to explore the mysteries of the human psyche and the power of the poetic image.

I have never had the opportunity to watch the Peanuts cartoon in French. However, I dare to assert that if I were to do so, the teacher's tone and approach might bear a resemblance to that of Monsieur Bachelard.

The content within this book seems to be a jumbled mess, somewhere between the meanderings of a luckless shaman and the esoteric gibberish spouted by a drug-addled poet over cheap pints at the student union.

He is indeed quite excitable about his ideas, and initially, this enthusiasm can be rather infectious. However, this soon fades away. Bachelard leans quite heavily on psychoanalysis, especially on the work of Jung. He also drones on and on about Rilke, Baudelaire, and Thoreau, quoting liberally from these individuals in the belief that this passes for his own work.

We are bombarded with a great deal of talk about topoanalysis, phenomenology, and poetry. But when all is said and done, it is incredibly difficult to get overly excited about any of this. He takes what are essentially elementary metaphors and does very little with them.

The best I can say about this is that, well, I suppose it's not too long. Either way, I simply do not see anything remotely original or insightful in this. I would venture to say that this is a prime example of meaningless mediocrity, masquerading as profundity.

Philosophy really fascinates me a lot. Or rather, I really like the way he presents beautiful ideas. Since the writer writes his book in a style that I have never read before, it makes me eager to read his other books for sure!

This unique style of his not only grabs my attention but also makes me think deeply about the ideas he is presenting. It's like opening a new door to a world of thoughts and perspectives that I haven't explored before.

I find myself completely immersed in his words, as if I am on a journey of discovery. Each sentence seems to hold a hidden gem of wisdom that I can't wait to uncover.

His way of writing is so captivating that it makes me want to explore more of his works and see what other wonderful ideas he has in store for me. I truly believe that reading his books will be a rewarding and enlightening experience.

Human beings know that Greece is a place related to their identity, and this occurs even when these places disappear from the present. And when we know that the future will not bring them back to us, and when we know that there is no longer a balcony or a flat surface, the fact still remains that we once lived in a flat, and that we once loved this balcony.

The ascent and descent in the same words - that is the life of the poet. The ascent to a passionate height and the descent to the profound depths is permitted for the poets who bring the sky to the earth.

_The Beauties of the Place - Gaston Bachelard

A captivating and enjoyable book of great significance, it abounds with emotions related to the most precise details of the place, and enhances the values of the things around humans. It is very beautiful, as if it is approaching the establishment of boundaries in the science of beauty.

Reading Gaston Bachelard is a long dream. It requires our ability to imagine that we are in a waking dream, so that we can feel before we understand and can evoke in the unconscious as much poetry as possible. We return again and again to the place, which transcends its geometry and gives it a personal quality.

In his study of the place, Bachelard goes beyond the phenomenological approach, which is traditional in the study of the phenomenon through its subjective boundaries without any external context, whether cultural or religious, transcending this subjective view of the place by embracing art (poetry and literature) in his attempts to give beautiful interpretations of the place.

It seems that the house is what Bachelard means by the concept of place. For him, the place is everything that is familiar and has the least characteristics of a refuge. There is no better example than the house to prove our first starting point in existence, our world, and our being the first as Bachelard describes before "throwing man into the world."

The difference between houses and other places lies in the fact that they carry more personal and continuous experiences. Bachelard believes that the place is never empty of the presence of a single being in it, but rather it is filled with its memories and dreams, so that time is open and intertwined in some of it. To find ourselves in this closed place means that we hold on to the movement of time and obtain it "stationary" as he describes it. Inside the houses, our childhood and our entire past live, the moments of our solitude and the sought-after isolation, and our successive waking dreams live.

Although Bachelard's approach focuses more on the value of the place than its geometry, he sets formal criteria for evaluating the beauty of the place and the awareness of it. The houses that are free from exaggeration and luxury allow a person to experience it with all its deep considerations. Simplicity is an essential part of the beauty of the place. The huts and rural houses give a more palpable experience than palaces and city houses. A person in the city experiences it separately from what happens outside. He does not hear the sound of rain from the upper floors, while the one who lives in the hut feels the storms and rain. He is united with the world (outside) from his center (inside). As for the houses that have attics and basements, corridors and passages, they carry more personal and beautiful complexities than the others. The attic represents the attic of the soul and what we experience on the surface of the self, while the basement is the knowledge of the unconscious, the friend of our solitude, and our need to hide far away to dig into the depths without history. In a more precise sense, we are subject to the dynamics of the place and its details. We divide ourselves in it, refugees to classification and the allocation of a corner for the situation we live in and nothing else.

Bachelard's poetic readings that are inspired by the place in its various forms and metaphors fascinate me. Poetry alone reveals the magic of things, and the imagination is an important tool - as the dreamy philosopher emphasizes - to add our visions and images in the midst of this poetic revelation. I remembered when I read the chapter on attics where the metaphors of the attic revolve around the feeling of security. My grandfather's house and my childhood there, and I'm not exaggerating when I mention the existence of a small attic on the column of the veranda there. The smell of gasoline in my grandfather's car remained a reassuring fragrance like no other, leading me to all the places and all of them were enjoyable because I was in my grandfather's safe car. I think that the smell of the tenderness of his car reached a cat one day and found my grandfather's moving car a suitable place for childbirth. The glass of one of the windows was broken in an incident that I do not remember. I only remember that we adopted the small cats and that was my first surprise in the winter. The small cats were blind. I will never forget that every time I visit my grandfather's house, I return as a small child who has never experienced what adulthood means.

Bachelard also gives great importance to household furniture. The drawers, boxes, and closets for clothes, all of them in one way or another have a memory and keys to it. They hold the secrets of experience. They are symbols of preservation and concealment. Again, I remember my violent desire to close all the open doors. A closed door means a final separation from everything around it. I think that doors are more important than anything else, even more than windows. Although I like windows a lot and have always felt that they are ready to be a composition or a small detail that seeps into existence. The window of my room (my window) is a background of life that blows from the street radio. I talk through it to the little neighbors - and the big ones too - and the conversations that took place between us in the void. The passage of cars with the songs of the festivals and which know that their owners enjoy turning up the volume without caring about others. And the birds of our trees that sometimes bother me with their chirping and I feel that they are in my head a reason for anger, and sometimes they are the breath of the mornings and the mood that shines with happiness from anything.

*I find a book like this excellent in the midst of our pandemic crisis (Corona or Covid-19) and the health quarantine that shows us that now there is no place for us but our houses...

I find it excellent in all circumstances, one of the best readings I have had so far... Books like this touch on my diverse thoughts and feelings, and reading them brings them together...

If you've ever looked out a window on a snowy day, a warm cup of coffee/hot chocolate/tea in your hand, your body wrapped in a blanket, the soft light of a fireplace nearby, you probably thought about how pleasant your situation was. You may even have thought something like "I love winter, it's such a cozy time." It all seems natural enough, the stuff of hallmark cards and Folgers commercials.

The Poetics of Space is hard to describe, but I suppose its goal is to look a little deeper at the feelings and emotions experienced in vignettes like this. "A house in winter," and the deep feeling of satisfaction and security it can evoke, is a nearly universal image, found in multiple arts--literature, poetry, film, etc. In particular, it is a place-based image. Winter is not actually cozy at all; it is cold and dark, and has a corresponding imagery all its own in the arts related to those ideas. The winter house as refuge is born from a contrast to this imagery--you like the winter because the house protects you from it, shelters you. In a related example, Bachelard notes that we sometimes find violent storms exhilarating when hearing or observing them from within the security of our own home. If you've ever listened to the wind howling and whistling outside your walls, the occasional but subtle creak of beams and tree branches, you know this feeling without me having to describe it further. As with winter, your satisfaction is not with the storm itself, which is destructive, and without shelter could harm you. "When the shelter is secure, the storm is good," as Bachelard says.

This book is full of examples like this, delving into the nature of what Bachelard calls "topoanalysis"--as he defines it, "the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives." He begins with houses, but ranges across different kinds of "intimate space": corners, nests, chests and drawers, and even concepts like miniatures/immensity and roundness.

Clearly, he is making the point that the physical representations of these things, like an actual house, are more than just objects you can touch and interact with. They are the stuff of "images," which in Bachelard's usage is not just a picture or metaphor. It is something deeper and almost inexpressible, a thing of the imagination. Psychology is a factor here, but not exactly the same. Yes, you might have a fear of the basement because once when you were three years old you accidentally wandered down into one and were scared of the dark there. But even without this, basements have an association with the chthonic. You don't "learn" this intellectually, you feel it in your bones.

Bachelard is not so much concerned with why this is than he is with meditating upon it. In a way this whole book is a kind of meditation, a way of seeing things that doesn't try to get too attached to explaining or deconstructing the imagery of our intimate spaces. Look too closely and the image disappears or becomes absurd. In his chapter on chests and drawers, Bachelard highlights a passage from a book in which an author imagines a world inside a box. Naturally, when he opens the box, there is nothing of the sort inside, but instead of talking about how this world never really existed, since it was scientifically impossible, he talks about how it must have vanished when he opened the lid. Whether you find this amusing/enchanting or empirically ridiculous, the tendency is to just dismiss writing like this as fanciful. If encountered in a person you meet, you might think they are eccentric at best. "In reality however, the poet has given concrete form to a very general psychological theme, namely, that there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience."

Bachelard is not trying to pit literary imagination against science and reason, far from it. Indeed, there is almost a kind of strange consilience with the above quote and actual scientific ideas, like Schrodinger's Cat. That's beside the point however. The point is that imagination, along with art, can help us "see." The imagination is "never wrong," because it goes beyond reality.

These are not easy concepts to put into words, so it is significant that Bachelard continually notes the power of art, particularly poetry, to express them. This is a powerful book because it explains feelings you might have had for stories, poems, paintings, etc., you've encountered during your life that you cherish, but are sometimes at a loss to understand why. I found myself thinking a lot about the poetry and prose of Borges, who often wrote about inexpressible feelings in seemingly mundane places. A street in Buenos Aires in the late afternoon, a leftover matchbook in an old drawer, the feeling of loss when realizing that the last time you saw someone was the last time you would ever see them again, but didn't know it then. Borges understood the power of imagery, and frequently invoked them in his writing--the endless "Library of Babel" could be one of immensity under Bachelard's reasoning, while the accursed coin in "The Zahir" might be one of miniaturization, and so on.

There are lots of similar examples, many from art that might get labelled "indie," or "introspective," by the more diplomatic, "boring" by others. Bachelard remarks that stories or art like this can act as a kind of litmus test for the reader/viewer and how they "see." One of his favorite examples was an account by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, about a time that he cleaned his piano. Described like this, it sounds painfully mundane. Why would anyone care to read about this? What is the point? For Bachelard, it is the ability to find joy and creativity in places where these things are not obvious: "The whole thing is a complex of sentiments, with its association of politeness and mischief, of humility and action....Some may disdain it or wonder that it should interest anyone; whereas to others it may seem alive, effective and stimulating, since it offers each one of us a means of becoming aware of our room by strongly synthesizing everything that lives in it, every piece of furniture that wants to be friends."

To me, this explains much about those novels or movies that "don't seem to be about anything." Think of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, or Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." Very little "happens" in art like this, nothing of world-shattering import. The actions of the characters, if they can even be described as actions, are insignificant:

"But what a joy reading is, when we recognize the importance of these insignificant things, when we can add our own personal daydreams to the 'insignificant' recollections of the author! Then insignificance becomes the sign of extreme sensitivity to the intimate meanings that establish spiritual understanding between writer and reader.

And what charm it confers upon our memories to be able to say to ourselves that, except for the suede gloves, we have lived moments similar to those lived by Rilke!"

Being able to imagine the lives of others, both real and fictional, and in the process see them and ourselves better, is the whole reason the humanities exist and why they are still important. This is what separates art from its shallow, navel-gazing imitation. A poem written authentically, from the imagination of a person who knows the power of imagery, will always resonate with those it is intended for.

This review began with houses and ended with a more general talk about art, but that is the format Bachelard follows. As you read you will find yourself moving from discussions about basements and attics, to the difference between psychology and phenomenology, to the importance of dreams and daydreams. A highly recommended journey!

The text seems to be rather cryptic and perhaps a bit of a personal or niche observation. However, here's an expanded version:

The work in question appears to suffer from the typical French issue. It seems to be based off just one idea, and unfortunately, it doesn't really progress or develop in a meaningful way. But then again, perhaps it doesn't truly matter if the author is someone who has what could be called a "haunted house/childhood home derangement syndrome." Maybe this unique perspective or fixation allows for a different kind of exploration, one that doesn't necessarily follow the traditional narrative arcs or expectations. It could be that within this seemingly one-note approach lies a deeper, more hidden meaning or emotional resonance that only those with a similar mindset can fully appreciate.

When one envisions reading a book that elicits slow and profound reflection, satisfaction is often elusive.

Instead, writers often strive too hard to prod and stimulate a reader's sensibilities.

Bachelard, on the other hand, simply contemplates space in a (meta)physical sense and uncovers, through poetry and phenomenology (with just a hint of philosophy), the profound and unshadowed aspects within doorways, locks, corners, and the voids of space.

This is not a book for distraction or for the easily distracted.

Rather, it challenges readers to carve out real space for contemplation.

It is not about a profound shift in paradigm or a pseudo-science upheaval, but rather about an indelible and unforgettable awareness of what already surrounds us.

It encourages us to look closely at the spaces we inhabit and to discover the hidden depths and meanings within them.

Bachelard's work invites us to engage in a thoughtful exploration of the world around us and to appreciate the beauty and significance of the seemingly ordinary.

It's one of those remarkable books that possess the rare gift of articulating precisely what I've always intuitively known.

Wittgenstein's dictum "About what one cannot speak, one must remain silent" holds true for a philosopher. However, the ineffable is precisely where poets dare to make a primal utterance. Not to mindlessly fill it with empty chatter, but to hallow it with voices that deepen the silence. This is why Bachelard's phenomenology, though a branch of philosophy, bears a closer resemblance to poetry. He murmurs to you all the things you've always known, that intimate knowledge we all share tacitly. Yet, he augments its mystery by speaking of it with a hushed clarity that doesn't desecrate the subject matter as psychologists, philosophers, or psychoanalysts might.

It makes perfect sense that he employs poets and writers as the foundation for his exploration of intimate spaces. More specifically, the poet's image, which emerges purely in a realm prior to thought or language, springing forth without history, context, or reason. The image is Bachelard's means of studying the essence of safe havens where daydreaming occurs, such as the house, the drawer, and the shell. The phenomenologist, like the poet, is solely interested in the essence of a thing, which often has only tenuous connections to the actual physical reality of that thing. Since I too exist almost entirely within the imagination,

this book had the curious effect of feeling simultaneously familiar and novel. For once, someone truly gets it! Bachelard doesn't analyze. Instead, he causes the tongues of these diverse images to resonate at harmonic frequencies and then invites you to listen to the resonances. It's like attending church. There is a sense of awe, play, and love that only comes after intense immersion. Many of my own poems are grounded in this same seeing/hearing, particularly my "In the Sea, There Are a Million Things in There" poems and my chapbook "A Reduction" (yes, a bit of shameless self-promotion!), both of which commence with the inextricably intertwined worlds of large and small as a domain for daydreaming.

Silence.....as I enter into it.....the absence of sound allows for the infinite creative potentialities to seep through into our emergent existence.

To understand silence, to understand space is to understand the emergent infinite plane.

Indulgence in this book will transport you back to the days of childhood. The house we grew up in acted as the second womb. These intimate spaces, such as the house, the cellar, the basement etc., affect our psyche in hitherto unexplored ways.

The poets throughout time have used these images of intimate spaces to evoke different feelings in the reader. The lonely house in the woods with the lit lamp is more than its physical constituents. If you are a seeker in the realm of man's psyche, your thirst will not be left unquenched.

Within this extraordinary philosopher's reflections on the poetics of space, you might find some symbols of the images in dreams. Reflecting along with the symbolic thoughts of Gaston Bachelard might reacquaint you with the keys to understanding your mind deeply.

I highly recommend this great book. It is a gem of original thought on a subject that is not much explored. It offers unique insights and perspectives that can expand your understanding of the relationship between space and the human psyche.

Whether you are interested in philosophy, psychology, or literature, this book has something to offer. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to delve deeper into the mysteries of the human mind and the role that space plays in our lives.

So, pick up this book and embark on a journey of self-discovery and exploration. You won't be disappointed.

**"Room with a View: 60 Years On, Gaston Bachelard's Ideas Still Ignite Our Imagination"**

Gaston Bachelard's work has had a profound and lasting impact. Even 60 years after its initial publication, his ideas continue to captivate and inspire.

His exploration of the relationship between the physical space of a room and our inner world is truly fascinating.

Bachelard argues that a room is not just a physical structure but a place that holds our dreams, memories, and emotions.

It is a space where we can retreat, reflect, and let our imagination run wild.

The article on CBC Radio's "Ideas" delves deeper into Bachelard's ideas and how they still resonate with us today.

By examining the concept of a "room with a view," Bachelard shows us how our perception of space can shape our experiences and understanding of the world around us.

Whether it's a small, cozy room or a grand, expansive one, each space has the potential to evoke powerful emotions and激发 our creativity.

To learn more about Bachelard's ideas, check out the full article at https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/room-w...

A Fascinating Exploration of the Spatial Quality of the Human Imagination

Renowned French philosopher Gaston Bachelard embarks on a captivating journey into the phenomenology of the intimate spaces we inhabit. In this pursuit, he abandons strictly critical thought and instead delves into the rich world of poetry. The corpus he draws from consists mainly of French poets that the reader may not be familiar with. As Bachelard examines various spaces such as cellars and attics (ch 1–2), drawers, chests and wardrobes (ch 3), nests (ch 4), shells (ch 5), corners (ch 6) and so on, a sense of joy permeates the text.

This study of intimate spaces clearly focuses on the positive aspects of inhabiting interior spaces. Bachelard briefly mentions the ways humans protect themselves from the dangerous outside, like storms. However, his account is rather anthropocentric and could benefit from an update. Currently, the reader is a few hundred pages into Peter Sloterdijk’s massive 2500-page trilogy Spheres, specifically reading the first part Bubbles: Spheres I slowly. It seems that Sloterdijk approaches this subject from a more modern perspective. Moreover, Bachelard’s remarks regarding domestic space, such as housekeeping, which has traditionally been considered a woman’s domain, come across as a little outdated. Nevertheless, it is still a great read, and the reader feels fortunate to be able to spend research time reading something as literary as this, rather than just academic theory and criticism.