the significance of the hut
Still reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. I have tried and failed to read this book for years. There is a receipt in the pages, the ink faded to illegibility. But in the right light and looking at it from the side, I can make out Barnes & Noble, Westport, 12-17-01.
Maybe I was having trouble with the long introduction. This time, I skipped the introduction and went directly into Chapter 1, The House from Cellar to Garret, the Significance of the Hut. I also read with a pen, so I could underline. I found I had to read slowly. The tendency was to skim along, trying to get through the chapter, but that didn’t work at all. The slow pace is important to enjoyment.
It’s an odd book. It seems to be striving for rigor and science in the analysis of imagery, but flies away at every turn. Many of the statements are intuitively obvious – “The lamp in the window … is never lighted out-of-doors, but is enclosed light …” – but maybe no one has said them before. The translation seems stilted. The “literature” referenced are mostly obscure French texts, a few passages from Rilke. The thesis of the importance of the childhood house doesn’t resonate with me. As one who grew up in a suburban tract house carved out of a soybean field, and lacking both basement and habitable attic, the resonant places of my youth were outdoors: the wild pocket of the “dead-end” at the end of the cul-de-sac, the disturbed swamp area under construction behind the next row of homes, the edge between backyards and Farmer Ralph’s vanishing soybean field.
But the book is full of deliciously refreshing lines. I’m inspired to try to pair some of these lines with images. I have underlined them so I can find them again.
Besides the receipt, between the pages I also found three pressed red rose petals.
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Some quotes from Chapter 2:
…everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate. (39)
This absence of struggle is often the case of the winter houses in literature. (40)
He puts his trust in the wisdom of the storm… (42)
When the image is new, the world is new. (47)
If the Creator listened to poets, He would create a flying turtle that would carry off into the blue the great safeguards of earth. (54)
It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality. (61)
The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep. (68)