Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man.
- Gaston Bachelard (from Poetics of Space)
3 comments:
The color is superb, delectable, simple but subtle.
I was just thinking of that chapter of "Poetics of Space" this morning; I love his term "intimate immensity", with its apparent contradiction and its deeper truth - dialectic and poetic - and the kinesthetic feeling he has for inwardness, as in the passage you quoted.
Bachelard quotes all sorts of poets in that book. One I love very much is from the poet Eluard:
"When the peaks of our skies come together, my house will have a roof."
And doesn't he say somewhere that houses are "stars of grass"?
Stephen, I always love to see your name here because I know it's going to surprise and inspire me. I'd like to make a group of images motivated by your comments alone!
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