Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.
Gaston BachelardRead
In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A reverie, unlike a dream, is a deeply emotional experience that can only be shared through writing, revealing the intimate connection between two people.
In this quote, Bachelard contrasts dreams with reveries, stating that reveries are profound emotional experiences that cannot be easily explained; they require the medium of writing to express their depth. He suggests that written love expresses a unique fusion of two people's inner worlds, providing a lasting connection that transcends mere communication, and though such expressions may seem outdated, their emotional significance endures, especially for those who appreciate the beauty of poetic expression in relationships.
Themes
LoveEmotionWritingConnectionPoetry
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a wedding speech to highlight the importance of written love letters.
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes →Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
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Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
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Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.
Gaston BachelardRead
How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.
Gaston BachelardRead
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