mhsteger: Gaston Bachelard (born 27 June, 1884; died 16 October, 1962), pictured above in a 1936 photograph with his daughter, during a walk in Bergères (© Association des Amis de Gaston Bachelard) ‘It is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond that history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order to actually live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion … Poetry gives not so much a nostalgia for youth, which would be vulgar, as a nostalgia for the expressions of youth.  It offers us images as we should have imagined them during the “original impulse” of youth.  Primal images, simple engravings are but so many invitations to begin imagining again.  They give us back areas of being, houses in which the human being’s certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that by living in such images as these, in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life, a life that would be our own, that would belong to us in our very depths…’ —from The Poetics of Space (1964; originally published in 1958; translated from the French by Maria Jolas)

mhsteger:

Gaston Bachelard (born 27 June, 1884; died 16 October, 1962), pictured above in a 1936 photograph with his daughter, during a walk in Bergères (© Association des Amis de Gaston Bachelard)

‘It is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond that history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order to actually live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion …

Poetry gives not so much a nostalgia for youth, which would be vulgar, as a nostalgia for the expressions of youth.  It offers us images as we should have imagined them during the “original impulse” of youth.  Primal images, simple engravings are but so many invitations to begin imagining again.  They give us back areas of being, houses in which the human being’s certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that by living in such images as these, in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life, a life that would be our own, that would belong to us in our very depths…’

—from The Poetics of Space (1964; originally published in 1958; translated from the French by Maria Jolas)

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