Eldin, Beyond the Sky, 2013
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. And when
we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions
of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human;
pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream
itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are
experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become
extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the
attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in
summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say
through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool,
always comforting.
Gaston Bachelard
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