As the result of this universal whiteness

Snow is a form of light.

-Yves Bonnefoy

Image: Cuno Amiet
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Being or nothing, that is the question

      We are never real historians, but always near poets... 

   -Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Image: Federico Hurtado, Portraits Without Masks
Title: Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro

An expression of poetry that was lost

the invisible thing inside
circling
     glass
     on its voyage out
     to the heart

-Michael Ondaatje, “*(Insomnia)” from the collection The Cinnamon Peeler

Image: Louise Bourgeois, The Insomnia Drawings, 2000
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

In the vast world or in the immense past

… the silence
Holds with its gloved hand
The wild hawk of the mind.

— R. S. Thomas, excerpt from “The Untamed” 

Images: Found; Edward Curtis
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Fields Engraved in the Soul

"Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had a map of his fields engraved in his soul. And Jean Wahl once wrote …The frothing of the hedges / I keep deep inside me… Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived."

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Image:  Sam Winston