This book seemed so promising. The title sounds exactly in my interest area. The table of contents is this tempting list: "The House, from Cellar to Garret, The Significance of the Hut", "House and Universe", "Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes", "Nests", "Shells", "Corners", "Miniature", "Intimate Immensity", "The Dialectics of Outside and Inside", "The Phenomenology of Roundness". I should have been warned by the last one though.

The book was wretched. It had very little to do with actual spaces and instead was a philosophical analysis of a random spattering of literary passages having, sometimes ever so vaguely, to do with physical space. To help you experience my pain, I will share a sadly representative passage:

And quite paradoxically, even cubic dimensions have no more meaning, for the reason that a new dimension -- the dimension of intimacy -- has just opened up.

and

I should like to quote a marvelously perceptive fragment ... which offers a veritable theorem of the topo-analysis of intimate space.

and finally,

Since it is my endeavor to multiply all the dialectical shadings by which the imagination confers life upon the simplest images, I should like to note a few references to the offensive capacity of shells.

Ugh. ( )

Finally done with this bad boy! A challenging but ultimately rewarding read. Bachelard’s idea about a phenomenology of the imagination, one that tries to examine images with a primal, immemorial source, is utterly mesmerising and fertile (though I do believe poetry/art consists of more than that which Bachelard values most in this book). A lot of it went over my head - it’s super dense - definitely down for a re-read. I don’t think I’ll look at poetry (or elements of reality) in the same way again. ( )

I am my own hiding place. Pg.88.

The primitiveness of refuge. the animal movements of withdrawal. Pg 91

( )

Very well done and thoroughly intriguing. ( )

I bought this at the James Castle House in Boise, Idaho, inasmuch as Deleuze and hourglasses were both mentioned (and I bought an hourglass, too). A fabulous, sustained reverie for the poet in us all.