The Sixth Sense

"The sixth sense is a delicate little Aeolian harp that nature has set at the entrance to our breathing...which followed and surpassed the others. It quivers at the merest movement of metaphor; it permits human thought to sing.
I begin to think the vowel a is the vowel of immensity. It is a sound area that starts with a sigh and extends beyond all limits.
Like some soft substance, it receives the balsamic powers of infinite calm. With it, we take infinity into our lungs, and thorough it, we breathe cosmically, far from human anguish."

Gaston Bachelard

The Poetics of Space

Daydreaming

„The chief benefit of the house: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being.

Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relieved as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream….It maintains man through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world.”

Gaston Bachelard

The Poetics of Space

Immensity

„Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being. The presence of an obvious immensity can point the way to intimate depth. When the dreamer really experiences the world immense, he sees himself liberated from his cares and thoughts, even from his dreams. He is no longer shut up in his weight, the prisoner of his own being."

Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space

„As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space, I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being: and I smiled, because it had never occured to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! 

My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! 

When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night’s own solitude in a universe without end!”

O. V. de Milosz

L'amoureuse initiation