#bachelard

Il faut désirer lire beaucoup, lire encore, lire toujours. Aussi, dès le matin, devant les livres accumulés sur ma table, au dieu de la lecture je fais ma prière de lecteur dévorant : « Donnez-nous aujourd’hui notre faim quotidienne… »

"Psychiquement, nous sommes créés par notre rêverie. Créés et limités par notre rêverie, car c'est la rêverie qui dessine les derniers confins de notre esprit."

In Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie (tr. Daniel Russell) a passage eerily akin to Tarkovsky’s Mirror:

It is striking that even in our homes, where there is light, our consciousness of well-being should call for comparison with animals in their shelters. An example may be found in the following lines by the painter, Vlaminck, who, when he wrote them, was living quietly in the country: "The well-being I feel, seated in front of my fire, while bad weather rages out-of-doors, is entirely animal. A rat in its hole, a rabbit in its burrow, cows in the stable, must all feel the same contentment that I feel". Thus, well-being takes us back to the primitiveness of the refuge. Physically, the creature endowed with a sense of refuge, huddles up to itself, takes to cover, hides away, lies snug, concealed. If we were to look among the wealth of our vocabulary for verbs that express the dynamics of retreat, we should find images based on animal movements of withdrawal, movements that are engraved in our muscles. How psychology would deepen if we could know the psychology of each muscle and what a quantity of animal beings there are in the being of a man! But our research does not go that far. It would already be a good deal if we were able to enhance the value of these images of refuge by showing that by understanding them, in a way, we live them.