81
" George Sand, dreaming beside a path of yellow sand, saw life flowing by. “What is more beautiful than a road?” she wrote. “It is the symbol and the image of an active, varied life” (Consuelo, vol. II, p. 116). Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul. "
― Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Space
87
" In reality, however, the passions simmer and resimmer in solitude: the passionate being prepares his explosions and his exploits in this solitude. And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. "
― Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Space
89
" Needless to say, all the poet really sees is a tree in a meadow; he is not thinking of a legendary Yggdrasill that would concentrate the entire cosmos, uniting heaven and earth, within itself. But the imagination of round being follows its own law: since, as the poet says, the walnut tree is "proudly rounded," it can feast upon "heaven's great dome." The world is round around the round being.
And from verse to verse, the poem grows, increases its being. The tree is alive, reflective, straining toward God.
Dieu lui va apparaitre
Or, pour qu'il soit sur
Il developpe en rond son etre
Et lui tend des bras murs.
Arbre qui peut-etre
Pense au-dedans.
Arbre qui se domine
Se donnant lentement
La forme qui elimine
Les hasards du vent!
(One day it will see God
And so, to be sure,
It develops its being in roundness
And holds out ripe arms to Him.
Tree that perhaps
Thinks innerly
Tree that dominates self
Slowly giving itself
The form that eliminates
Hazards of wind! "
― Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Space