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
The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the conflicts between our waking passions and our dreams, suggesting that solitude during dreams can feel hostile.
Gaston Bachelard contemplates the nature of dreams and solitude, asserting that our dreams often carry the weight of our unfulfilled desires and troubling experiences from waking life. He posits that the solitude we experience in dreams may not be genuine, as it is tainted by the emotional burdens of daily life, leading to a sense of inner conflict and hostility rather than peace.
Themes
DreamsSolitudePassionLifeHostility
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on psychology, to explain the impact of daily life on our dreams.
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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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