Great Throughts Treasury

"If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?"

"Imagination is itself immanent in the real. It is not a state. It is human existence itself."

"Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomizes a universe, which makes a universe."

"In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries."

"In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I."

"In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word."

"In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a "force" when it no longer has individuality?"

"In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act."

"In short, it must be confessed that there are two types of reading: reading in animus and the anima reading. I'm not the same man when I read a book of ideas, where the animus must stay vigilant, ready for criticism, ready for replication, or a poet's book, in which images must be received in a transcendental kind of reception of gifts . Ah, to echo this absolute gift that is a poet image would require our anima could write a thank you song! The animus read little; the anima, too."

"In scientific thought, the concept functions all the better for being cut off from all background images. In its full exercise, the scientific concept is free from all the delays of its genetic evolution, an evolution which is consequently explained by simple psychology. The virility of knowledge increases with each conquest of the constructive abstraction."

"In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced."

"In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles . . . . And if we want to go beyond history, or even, while remaining in history, detach from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it, we realize that the calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery."

"In poetry, wonder is coupled with the joy of speech."

"Indeed, I am a dreamer of words, a dreamer of words written. I read. I stopped short. Leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to stir. The tonic accents are reversed. The word leaves his sense too heavy a burden that prevents dream. The words then take other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words are, among the thickets of vocabulary, looking for new, bad company. Many minor conflicts must be resolved when the vagabond reverie, it becomes fair vocabulary. And it's worse when instead of reading I start to write. Under the pen, the anatomy of syllables slowly unfolds. The word lives syllable by syllable, in danger of internal reveries. How to keep it together forcing their usual easements outlined in the sentence, a phrase that perhaps we will delete the manuscript? Is not the phrase branches started dreaming? The word is an outbreak that tries to give a twig. How not to dream while typing. Pen dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. If only I could write for yourself. How hard is the fate of the maker of books! We must cut and re-sewing to have continuity in ideas. But when you're writing a book about dreaming, is there no time to let them run the pen, leaving talk to dreaminess and better yet, to dream the dream at the same time you believe estarla transcribing ? - Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Reverie"

"Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream. There are calm beaches in the midst of nightmares."

"Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists."

"Indeed, it is not in the least surprising that metaphors can be found that illustrate time if we make them the single connecting factor in the most varied of domains, in life, music, thought, emotion, and history. We think that by superimposing all these more or less empty, more or less blank images, we can make contact with the fullness of time and the reality of time; from a blank, abstract duration in which just the possibilities of being would be found, lined up one after the other, we think that we can move on to duration that is lived, felt, loved, sung, and written about it literature."

"It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality."

"It is not uncommon my animus to scold me for reading too? Read, read always, mellifluous passion of the anima. But when, after reading all give ourselves to the task, with daydreams, to make a book, the effort is up to the animus. And always a hard mister, that of writing a book. We are always tempted to limit ourselves to dream."

"It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this "failing asleep", the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being."

"It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant", where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observer and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us."

"It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry."

"It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization."

"It seems that the joy of reading is a reflection of the joy of writing as if the reader was the ghost writer."

"Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books."

"Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed."

"Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need."

"Man is an imagining being."

"Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer...In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer's ghost."

"Of course, a psychologist would find it more direct to study the inspired poet. He would make concrete studies of inspiration in individual geniuses. But for all that, would he experience the phenomena of inspiration? His human documentation gathered from inspired poets could hardly be related, except from the exterior, in an ideal of objective observations. Comparison of inspired poets would soon make us lose sight of inspiration."

"Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him."

"Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives."

"Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives."

"One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things."

"Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child."

"One must always maintain one?s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort."

"One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in."

"Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image cannot provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life."

"Our house is our corner of the world."

"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 start 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."

"Pierre-Jean Jouve writes: poetry is a soul inaugurating form. The soul inaugurates. Here it is the supreme power. It is human dignity. Even if the form was already well-known, previously discovered, carved from commonplaces, before the interior poetic light was turned upon it, it was a mere object for the mind. But the soul comes and inaugurates the form, dwells in it, takes pleasure in it."

"Poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents of the intense life of language."

"Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. . . . One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language."

"Poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul."

"Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic detente. It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking force. Since it functions with inattention, it is often without memory. It is a flight from out of the real that does not always find a consistent unreal world."

"Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased."

"Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him."

"Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul."

"So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us."

"Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms... Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts--serious, sad thoughts--and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality."