{"id":2588,"date":"2012-12-27T15:47:20","date_gmt":"2012-12-27T22:47:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/?p=2588"},"modified":"2013-02-02T07:12:27","modified_gmt":"2013-02-02T14:12:27","slug":"beyond-the-hut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/2012\/12\/beyond-the-hut\/","title":{"rendered":"the significance of the hut"},"content":{"rendered":"

Still reading The Poetics of Space<\/em> by Gaston Bachelard. I have tried and failed to read this book for years. There is a receipt in the pages, the ink faded to illegibility. But in the right light and looking at it from the side, I can make out Barnes & Noble, Westport, 12-17-01. <\/p>\n

Maybe I was having trouble with the long introduction. This time, I skipped the introduction and went directly into Chapter 1, The House from Cellar to Garret, the Significance of the Hut. I also read with a pen, so I could underline. I found I had to read slowly. The tendency was to skim along, trying to get through the chapter, but that didn’t work at all. The slow pace is important to enjoyment. <\/p>\n

It’s an odd book. It seems to be striving for rigor and science in the analysis of imagery, but flies away at every turn. Many of the statements are intuitively obvious – “The lamp in the window … is never lighted out-of-doors, but is enclosed light …” – but maybe no one has said them before. The translation seems stilted. The “literature” referenced are mostly obscure French texts, a few passages from Rilke. The thesis of the importance of the childhood house doesn’t resonate with me. As one who grew up in a suburban tract house carved out of a soybean field, and lacking both basement and habitable attic, the resonant places of my youth were outdoors: the wild pocket of the “dead-end” at the end of the cul-de-sac, the disturbed swamp area under construction behind the next row of homes, the edge between backyards and Farmer Ralph’s vanishing soybean field. <\/p>\n

But the book is full of deliciously refreshing lines. I’m inspired to try to pair some of these lines with images. I have underlined them so I can find them again. <\/p>\n

Besides the receipt, between the pages I also found three pressed red rose petals. <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Some quotes from Chapter 2: <\/p>\n

…everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate. (39) <\/p>\n

This absence of struggle is often the case of the winter houses in literature. (40)<\/p>\n

He puts his trust in the wisdom of the storm… (42)<\/p>\n

When the image is new, the world is new. (47)<\/p>\n

If the Creator listened to poets, He would create a flying turtle that would carry off into the blue the great safeguards of earth. (54)<\/p>\n

It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality. (61)<\/p>\n

The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep. (68)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Still reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. I have tried and failed to read this book for years. There is a receipt in the pages, the ink faded to illegibility. But in...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2588"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2777,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions\/2777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gemtactics.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}