Ideas - Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space: A Place to Dream

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

It's been 60 years since French thinker Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space made its English-language debut. It’s a hard-to-define book — part architecture, philosophy, psychoanalysis, memoir. And it continues to feed our ongoing need for purposeful solitude and wide-open fields for our imagination.*This episode originally aired on March 7, 2022.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. The house we were born in is more than the embodiment of home. It's also an embodiment of dreams. Each one of its nooks and corners was a resting place for daydreaming. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. There was a physical moment of revelation where Gaston Bachelard made sense to me for the first time. I'm 19 years old. I'm holding his book in my hands.

And I feel the click of the sense of the house as an interior. I can say that probably no other book has caused the same kind of mental revolution in my mind than Bachelard's book. Once you have entered the poetics of space, there is no going back. The home you revisit is never the same again. In 1958, Gaston Bachelard, the French postmaster turned physicist turned philosopher, published what would become his most well-known work, The Poetics of Space, La Poétique de l'Espace. emotional architecture of the house. There's this sense that our murky, less clear thoughts happen in the lower levels underground, and that our thoughts keep clarifying as they come into light into the central part of the house, and we really relax into our reveries by the time we get to the attic. And that spatialization of emotion

is present throughout this book. And if there's a single idea that you take away from it, it's that your emotional architecture and the architecture of the house are one. For more than 60 years, The Poetics of Space has inspired poets, artists, architects, philosophers, and daydreamers. This documentary by Elisa Siegel asks, what does it offer us now? The first time I read The Poetics of Space, I was thrilled. I felt shock after shock of recognition. He was saying things that I had always felt but never articulated. I'm Molly Peacock. I'm a poet and a biographer. The Poetics of Space is a talisman book for me. I adored it in my 20s and my early 30s, and it was only in my 73rd year,

it's half a century away from when I first read the book, that I decided to teach it. And I made that decision because my life was in upheaval and all anchors were suspended. And I always teach a class in the spring and I thought, let's cling to a book. Come on, Molly, where's a talisman? Who could help you out? And I knew who it was. You see, I looked at the poetics of repose as a subtitle. Perhaps I should have written, the place of Joy is the place where we rest.

It is the book in my life that I have almost completely underlined from the beginning till the end. I am Juhani Pallasma, an architect, professor and writer from Helsinki, Finland. Vashlar's world is a rather amazing world because it relies so much on intuition and emotion. I had learned through my education to hold back my emotions and believe in rationality and intelligence. Bachelard complicated my view of architecture and myself. Bachelard changed me completely, and certainly Bachelard was always somehow near the center of my interest. I'm Richard Carney, and I'm fascinated with the imagination. For many years now, I've been teaching the philosophy of imagination in Boston College and in University College Dublin.

And a guiding inspiration for me always was the work of Gaston Bachelard. It's a hard question to answer, what is the Poetics of Space, because it's a unique kind of book. It's not, strictly speaking, just philosophy or just psychoanalysis or just literary criticism or just memoir or just, or just a sort of good advice for architects, engineers, and designers. It's all of these things, and none of them at once. It's a unique hybrid invention. It's a poem, in a way. You might say a philosophical poem, a meditative poem, that is open to everyone. And that's why it has become a classic. And it has had an extraordinary life taught in so many different university courses and read by so many readers that are not necessarily academic or scholarly,

but simply want to pick up a book and learn how to daydream again. and learn how to daydream again. The house is a nest for dreaming, a shelter for the imagination. About 18 years ago, I was studying my Master's in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and I was researching ideas about our human relationship with space. I was in the library and I was looking through the philosophy section, and just by chance, I found Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space underneath the library shelf. Somebody had hidden it. And when when I found it I couldn't believe it. It was exactly what I was searching for. My name is Isabel Egan and I am from Ireland.

I work as a ceramic artist and I've specialised working with porcelain. working with porcelain. All of my ceramic work is inspired by architecture. So my sculptures explore how buildings contain us physically and shelter us emotionally. So Bachelard's theories really resonated with me. The buildings I make out of porcelain are like little micro works of architecture. They're like little porcelain cityscapes. I made a piece called Treehouse House Folly. It's about 50 centimetres long and it's this tiny little ladder that you can travel up in your imagination into this little house on top. And it's a place for daydreaming. It's a place to think and dream. And that piece in particular, it's directly inspired by Gaston Bachelard's writing.

My concept is that these little boxes store the memories of our lifetime, little memories that are really sacred to us and that we can tap into at different times of our lives. A conventional way of thinking about the key theme of the poetic space is that, of course, it does start with childhood and the child's first experience of a room and the coolness of the room, or a staircase, or being underneath a table. My name is Ken Walpole. I'm a writer and social historian, but in recent years I've had a particular interest in architecture. For a child, the house is always much bigger than we experience it as adults. It's much more

mysterious. It's also much more material when, as a three-year-old, you still maybe have to climb a staircase on hands and knees. It's a completely different experience to just walking up it the house has this kind of it is a landscape in its own right it's a mountain range and it's also a castle and i think he wants us to remember that childish appreciation of the material world and the spatial world because otherwise we become inured to it or we find it all too banal. And therefore we learn to live with banality rather than hope that we can live with interest and design and imagination. Vash Lard says, But over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us.

It is a group of organic habits. We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture. We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture. We would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands. My own childhood space was so threatened. My dad was a World War II veteran with severe PTSD and self-medicated with alcohol. So he could be quite violent and he would be tearing the legs off the kitchen table, tearing the legs off the coffee table. We couldn't have any objects on any of the surfaces because they would be hurled and broken. So I had a refuge in my room. I made my own curtains and I made my

own little bedspread. And so there was a little tiny domestic life and spatial arrangement going on there, but my room didn't have a door on it. So I was always terrified that he would follow me in there and start breaking things up. So when he was in a terrorizing mode, I would stay in the room with him and I would watch the destruction because I didn't want him to follow me into my secret den and destroy things there. So when I first read The Poetics of Space, that's the background that I'm coming from of a young girl trying to create her den, her space, her cave. If you glance at the table of contents, you'll realize that this research was definitely a study of sensibility. Here is my original book of Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space,

and it is a hardcover. of Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, and it is a hardcover. It is filled with little bits of memorabilia. There are all kinds of little marks. The pages feel like a library book that has been touched by a lot of people, but it's been touched by me for 50 years, half a century.

I'm me for 50 years, half a century. I feel that Bachelard was telegraphing to us these nuggets of ideas, and that this table of contents is his poem. One, the house, from cellar to garret, the significance of the hut. Two, house and universe. Three, drawers, chest. Gaston Bachelard allowed a way to reframe the chaos of my childhood and to make my emotional reactions make sense.

Four nests. Five shells. I had a space for my fear. Six corners. I had a space for my fear. Six, corners. I had a space for my dread. I had a space for my joy. Seven, miniature. Eight, intimate immensity. I had a space for my sheer remembering. I had a mental space for play. I had a mental space for play. Nine, the dialectics of outside and inside. Things had boundaries. Houses have boundaries. There are rooms. There are doors.

There are windows. Ten, the phenomenology of roundness. There are all kinds of ways in which we experience inner and outer. And he gave me all of that. Gaston Bachelard was an extraordinary figure. He was born to a family of shoemakers at the beginning of the 20th century in a little town called Bar-sur-Aube in the Champagne region of France. And his first job was actually as a postmaster. He used to cycle his bike and deliver letters to people's homes. And from these very humble beginnings, which he never in a sense ever lost, he was always riding a bicycle and engaging in reverie, this sort of idle,

inventive, ruminating and musing in the imagination. But he left his job as a postmaster, went to Paris and became a professor of philosophy of science and wrote some 13 volumes on the philosophy of science in the 30s before then sort of becoming quite impatient with what he called a growing rationalism of contemporary science, which had sort of forgotten its own creativity and its own need to move forward, to experience rupture, novelty, metamorphosis. And so he turned to poetics. He moved sort of from philosophy of science to a philosophy of poetics, which was really going back to the Greek word poesis, meaning to make, to create. So Bachelard said, well, let's go to the source, to the most primordial mode of thinking and speaking and listening, which he believed was poetry. But poetry was not just, you know, T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, the professional poets. We are all poets, every one of us. And when we read poetry, we simply discover and rediscover

what's going on in our lives already, but which we often forget. So poetry is a reminder for science to become more innovative and creative, and for us human beings, us readers, to actually reclaim the creative power of imagination within ourselves. Chapter 8. Intimate Immensity. L'immensità si potrebbe definire come una categoria filosofica della riveri. One might say that immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. I'm Auroza Alizon. I'm a fellow professor at Politecnico di Milano in Landscape Aesthetics. I'm a philosopher and I'm an executive member of the International Association of Gaston Bachelard. I wrote my doctoral thesis about poetics of space and on my desk I have the Italian version, the French version and

the English version. So for me it's a bible. The poetics of space is especially popular in Italy and is read from all the future architects and from all the students of architecture. This book represents our culture to our traditional home. In Italy, we have a big tradition of historical architecture. abbiamo una grande tradizione di architettura storica la reverie certo si alimenta di spettacoli vari ma per una sorta di daydream

si mette su tutti i tipi di siti ma attraverso una sorta di natura della grandezza determina poi un atteggiamento tanto speciale uno stato d'animo tanto particolare il daydream trasporta il sognatore fuori and then has a very special attitude, a very particular state of mind.

The daydream transports the dreamer outside, the immidiate, that the reverie places the dreamer outside the circostant world, in front of a world that rules the dream of an infinite. It's the imagination, it's the imagination that has given its power to creation. It's the imagination. It's the imagination which has reached its creative power. In the very first chapter, I encountered a sentence. To read poetry is essentially to daydream. He writes also,

the great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams. And he means daydreams there. He means intimacy. And he says, all the spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction. There does not exist a real intimacy that is repellent. The spaces of intimacy, their being is well-being. Their being is well-being. Bachelard transformed the way I was thinking and seeing and dreaming, or at least daydreaming. If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say the house shelters daydreaming. The house protects the dreamer. The house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things

that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. humanity in its depths. One of the reasons that this book has such lasting power is he integrates thinking and feeling, and he does that by emphasizing daydreaming. Daydreaming is a part of how we negotiate the world. And when you beat daydreaming out of a child, you are separating thinking from feeling, and you are making that person into an automaton. Daydreaming even has a privilege of auto-valorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream.

It is because our memories of former dwelling places are relived as daydreams, that these dwelling places of the past remain in us for all time. Daydreaming and imagination are essential for being human, but also the task of architecture is to enable us to do that, to imagine a daydream. I myself cannot think very deeply by a seashore, for instance. That is too open space for me. I can think in a forest, but even better, to sit on a chair in a closed room. and qualities of protection where man will not only think but also dream. Space has qualities of refuge and qualities of protection where we go not to think but to dream. When I go back to the poetics of space, I'm reminded so often of just the kind of sanctity of the room.

It's strange how the room seems such a mundane concept, but it isn't. I mean, it's orientation towards the outside world, to the sun. It's how you enter the room, whether there is light from one side, two sides, or three sides. He makes you realize that the room is a very sacred space. It's not a cell. And this is the problem with modernism, of course, that Le Corbusier was much fascinated by the idea of the cellular. And I think it's a book like The Poetics of Space that made architects aware that when you're designing hospitals and hospices you're not designing cells you are designing rooms

and the atmosphere of those rooms and one of the most important things of any room is how you get into it and we know that to arrive in a room where someone you love is there is a special moment, an appointed moment. And when you leave a room and you close the door and someone who you love who is there, that's also very special. And that can't be achieved with a cheap, nasty, institutional door.

Bachelard writes, how concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome, and respect. That's why I'm personally so interested in designing subtleties in the door. For me, all the great buildings also introduce a tactile invitation in the scale of the human hand.

Human hand is such a subtle instrument, and I have considered the main door as the handshake of the building, and I have myself designed a special handshake to each one of my buildings. The book, The Projects of Space, girded my line, so to speak, to the extent that when I began to work with architects and designers in the field of hospital provision or home care provision or hospice provision, we had to kind of take the battle head on with the medicalisation of space because the medicalization of space is really can be obviously of great benefit to the young or the healthy or the seriously ill who are in urgent need and only intense medical treatment can solve the problem but when you're dealing with care homes

and when you're dealing with hospices when you know the final outcome of the person's slow, gradual inability to use all their faculties properly, that you want those faculties to be exercised in the most harmonious and caring environment that is possible. And you don't want to be surrounded by medical equipment and lights buzzing and bells ringing and a kind of sense of medical hysteria around them. And I think what the hospice movement has been most successful in doing has been re-humanising, re-domesticating the space of palliative care so that it becomes home-like and not institutional.

The common understanding is that architecture is out there around us somewhere and it is separate from what we are. But I believe very strongly that there is a strong identification between us and the world, our bodies and the space. When I enter a space, the space enters me. There is an exchange, constant exchange between us and the world. exchange between us and the world. Home is probably the most intimate place for each one of us. Home is very close to our intimate naked skin. Our homes are almost live creatures. They are so subtle and our relationship with our home is very similar to our relationship with our spouse or our children.

There's an intimacy and warmth. Home provides us safety, but it also provides us perspective to view the world. Always when I have returned back home, I realize that this is where I see the world correctly. I feel that our home is, it is my corner in the world. Bachelard writes that home is the place where we can dream in safety. Home, the notion of home is understood nowadays in two pragmatic and concrete and material terms and also economic terms. Home has a soul. The house as a tool for analysis of the human soul,

not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten, our house. Our soul is an abode. Our soul is an abode. And by remembering houses and rooms, we learn to abide within ourselves. We learn to abide within ourselves. So what Bachelard is basically saying there is that our soul is a house in which we dwell, and the world is also a house in which we dwell. world meet in the house, whether it be a lived real house, my house, your house, or whether it be an imaginary house. And in fact, for Bachelard, the imaginary house and the real house are actually ultimately indistinguishable if it's an authentic imaginative experience. imaginative experience. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus.

Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. ShortSighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. ShortSighted, from CBC's Personally, available now.

Gaston Bachelard was 73 years old when he published The Poetics of Space, a meditation on the nooks, drawers, and wardrobes where our daydreams come to life. and wardrobes where our daydreams come to life. Every corner in a house, wrote Bachelard, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination. Nighttime dreaming and daydreaming are not the same species. I only deal with dreams. Nighttime dreaming and daydreaming are not the same. I focus solely on daydreams. I think there's two things one could say about Bachelard's imagination in Pandemic Home.

One is that the imagination enables us to dream of homes and daydream of homes where the door can open and you can walk outside and you can open the window and the roof can be lifted. In other words, it enables us to dream of possibilities where we will be able to go back out into the world when the pandemic hopefully subsides. So it's that ability to always imagine something other and better. But in another sense, within the home, we can find things that can give us cause to dream. And that can be simple things like a marble that is round, a round ball that you can play with. That's the imagination at play. And therefore, we all have

that power to make from even little ordinary things in our home, however isolated and sequestered and closed, we can recreate a universe in a grain of sand. And I think of the great story of the prisoner in the book, An Evil Cradling, Brian Keenan, an Irish Belfast teacher, who was captured by Hezbollah for three or four years. And in his little cell, he discovered in an orange peel and in little matchsticks, the ability to imagine a whole world. He would play games, he would reconstruct all kinds of things just with these little material elements. That's the power of imagination, even in the worst form of darkness and despair, to be able to recreate a little world out of virtually nothing. And there is no home anywhere,

there is no dwelling place anywhere that does not have such things. We shouldn't get the idea that in making your home unique and special to you, yourself, this means you have to stay there permanently. It means that you have created a place from which you can go out into the world and come home again.

And this notion of coming home again is very important. It's as strong as leaving home, coming home again. There was a lovely musical song that ended, We All Go The Same Way Home. It's a song that was actually sung when people left the pub at the end of the evening and the boys and the girls would kind of arm in arm would march down the street we all go the same way home let's be hell and hearty don't break up the party just like the ivy on the old garden wall we all go the same way

all the old collection in the same direction all go the same way We're all going the same way home So there's no need to fight at all It's a very moving song because it has the double meaning of we all go the same way home. Of course, going home, a favourite expression of my mother's to do with clothes, that's a very Bachelardian notion. She might look at a sweater of mine and say that's not gonna look that's going home soon she used about everything oh this old teapot's going

home it's going home soon and that's the material world we're never going to say that about a skyscraper or about a plastic television cabinet it's home. But a tea cozy or a sweater or the curtains in the front room, they're going home soon. Ha, ha, ha! You have to consider this book as a book of a little fantasy, where we don't show anything, and we try to suggest some happiness to live well in our home. This book ought to be considered a philosophical work that is somewhat fantasy-like, where nothing is proven, and where we try rather to suggest, to encourage some joy of living well at home.

There is a way in which this book is absolutely universal to human experience, and there's another way in which this book, of course, is limited and dated. You know, it's written by a French white guy in rarefied circumstances who had an idea of a house that only in a house and garden photographs do we have the idea of a house in the French countryside. Of course it's poetic. So how do you translate that into a room where seven or eight people are sleeping? How do you translate that into a tent? How do you translate that into world migrations, where people are slogging through mud and where they're lucky if they've got a dry tent above them? When he is talking about childhood and childhood reverie, how do you

translate that into childhoods that are terrifying? Other people, as I've spoken to them, out of all kinds of circumstances, have attached to this book, there is a place that they went in their head to daydream. And I think about that. I think about when I, in my dry North American condominium, look at people who are drenched and wet, soaked to the skin, homeless, moving from place to place. And then there'll be a picture of a tent city and somebody in a tent. And I will see that someone in that tent has placed the possessions. They are arranged. They don't have a lot of possessions. There's a blanket. There's a jacket. of possessions. There's a blanket, there's a jacket, there's a little pot, and they are placed in relation to one another. Existence is being arranged in that tent in a migration. I see people with their bundles, and they've done that. That's the phenomenon. That's

the contemporary experience of people moving through space with their house on their back and still inside the dream of their space. It is essentially human, how we configure our spaces. And what we can share is this phenomenon of living and how we are navigating our lives from place to place. from place to place. Even that weird little security of your bed, your space, your last little home in a hospice room. That's why this book lasts and is important. I'm quite old, but I'd like to continue my work.

I'm trying, all that happens to me, I'm trying to understand things a bit differently now and not to remain rooted to what I've already understood. During my husband's final illness, it was a transition for him, but I was in transitional space constantly. I needed a refuge. And as your eye searches around an emergency room waiting area, for me, there's no sense of refuge. The Poetics of Space offers a refuge. It offers safety. And in crisis mode, I could turn to the idea of drawers, chests, and wardrobes. The idea of nests. The idea of shells. The idea of thinking of these intimate spaces.

The idea of space itself as manifesting refuges. Corners, for instance, pockets, and the little interiors thinking of all of the different kinds of space, miniature spaces, tiny houses. It was a great solace to me. It's a book about refuges, and the book itself became a refuge. I think Bachelard's book grows in importance now because we are facing an unprecedented change in the demographics of society in the Western world. You know, prior to the 20th century, very few people died of old age. Now, most of us die of old age.

And some people now may have 10, 15, 20 years, possibly, of ill health and poor mobility and poor intellectual stimulation before they finally die. And this has led to obviously a proliferation of forms of institutional care and supervision, but all, I have to say, very unsatisfactory because they failed to deal, as Bachelard would ask us to deal, with the spirit of these people. The key question is how do we combat the medicalisation of death and restore it to this notion that it is a natural part of life. to this notion that is a natural part of life.

The ideas in the work of people like Bachelard, and particularly, of course, the Poetics of Space, reminded us that the material world in which we live, particularly when it's a domestic world, and particularly within that larger domestic world, it's a particular room that so many people end up in at the end of their lives, which is often a bedroom or a hospital room and their place is a bed,

that that room has to give back everything that the person in the bed wants to give it. There has to be a conversation between the room and the person in the bed wants to give it. There has to be a conversation between the room and the person. And that room has to be changing minute by minute through the effects of light or the threats of seasons outside, through the furnishings, to keep this person kind of animated in the room. And I think the quality of materials is absolutely essential.

We have to make them at home again. As one architect told me, too often in hospitals the bed is regarded as the workbench. We should end life in a cradle, not on a workbench and that's a bachelardian notion this is a paragraph from the book with one of my favorite quotes It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world before he is cast into the world. As claimed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the house, and always in our daydreams. The house is a large cradle. A concrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact, the simple fact." But Barschlar's book teaches us that we need to develop a poetics of life. Now human culture is developing into the opposite direction,

where everything becomes materialistic and economic, and simply humanity is in trouble. I know that the poetic thinking, the poetic reality, can provide a help, and possibly the only help. The shell, you see, is a very well-defended space, but it is a space of rest. Gaston Bachelard is talking about interior spaces, but he connects them to the exterior. And weather is an important part of this book. At first, he's talking about winter weather, that winter is the most poetic space because it envelops us and makes the house even more of a sanctuary.

And he talks about the violence of weather outside and what it does to our imaginations to have violent weather outside and be inside the safety of the house, because that, for him, allows for violent feelings to be processed. But what does this say to us in the midst of now a climate change that people are suffering huge extremes of weather, so extreme that the weather threatens the houses that they are in. Where is the sense of refuge in that? Think of losing your space because of a hurricane, because of flooding. There is no poetics of space in the most violent aspects of climate change. And what does that mean for us? It means that our houses are primary, that the house as a space for us is so essential.

Think of the ways in which people return again and again to their houses to reclaim them. They go back and reclaim because that refuge, that prototype of the childhood house is in there. And not recognizing the importance of the house, of the primacy of people's necessity for a place to live, is, to my mind, the road to defeat for the way we are governing our nations. And that's the importance of the poetics of space. That room that each of us carries with us, that is what is traumatically endangered. What we can get from Bachelard is perhaps a sense that in spite of that tragic sense of dereliction and despair and dispiritedness, there is always something in the most minuscule,

ordinary, banal experience that can remind us that we are capable of resonating with the world. And in a way, perhaps our ecological recovery will come through an eco-phenomenology of imagination inspired by somebody like Bachelard and others who never seem to cease to dream and daydream about innovation and renovation and a better world. In every great work, no matter how dark, one will find a moment of what Bachelard calls epiphany, an instant that breaks out of chronological time and that gives us hope that things can be different. In philosophy, you know, denunciation and despair and dread, angst are de rigueur. There is this alternative and alternate universe that Bachelard offers, which is never escapism. It is, in fact, a very responsible form of daydreaming

with others in a world that is constantly in conversation with other writers and readers. And there is in Bachelard's philosophy, and I think this is one of the other reasons for his great success, that in the midst of 20th century horrors and indeed a philosophy of anxiety and worry and dread, Bachelard, without denying any of that, opens a space for welcome and for joy. Indeed, one of his contemporaries, Paul Ricoeur, sort of summed up Bachelard's philosophy of saying, it's the joy of yes in the sadness of no. Bachelard was very aware of the tragedy of our century, of our time, indeed of our finite human condition. But in spite of that, he affirmed the power of imagination as a power of yes, a power of welcome, of being open to all. As he says, when you dream imaginatively, there is no not I.

All is welcome. The nest. The nest is a house, obviously. I began with the nest, a real nest, the bird's nest. I went to great lengths to write this chapter. He says a nest, like any other image of rest and quiet, is immediately associated with the image of a simple house. When Bachelard says a nest house is never young, for not only do we come back to it, but we dream of coming back to it the way a bird comes back to its nest. The sign of return marks an infinite number of daydreams.

Bachelard writes, this wonder is lasting, that is the discovery of the nest. This wonder is lasting, and today when we discover a nest, it takes us back to our childhood, or rather to a childhood, to the childhoods we should have had. And Bachelard goes on to describe phenomenologically the actual nest. Gently, I lift a branch. In the nest is a setting bird, but it doesn't fly away, it only quivers a little. I tremble at having caused it to tremble. I am afraid that this setting bird will realize that I am a man, a being that has lost the confidence of birds. I remain motionless. Slowly the bird's fear and my own fear of causing fear are allayed,

or so I imagine. I breathe easily again and let go of the branch. I'll come back tomorrow. easily again and let go of the branch. I'll come back tomorrow. This is a living inhabited nest. A nest is a bird's house. And it's also our house because we are the bird in that experience. And the bird is us as we sort of sound each other out, as we resonate with each other, as we regain each other's confidence. And Bachelard's book is always bringing us back from text to life, from literature to the lived house, the lived nest, the lived way of being in the world. This speaks about the house. It is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos. Stunning sentence, but so true.

This is Bachelard talking about the future. There exists no more compact image of intimacy, none that is more sure of its center than a flower's dream of the future while it is still enclosed, tightly folded inside its seed. And this book, for so many, is a seed. I did this study in order to demonstrate that the poetics of space is a poetics on the joy of dwelling.

You were listening to a documentary about Gaston Bachelard and his book, The Poetics of Space, produced by Aliza Siegel. Special thanks to Martha Aileen, Sylvie Calfus, and Hans Eblitz. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. Thank you.