'The house would appear to have the topography of our intimate being.' Gaston Bachelard Poetics of Space(xxxvi)
Bachelard proposes that the house is not merely a shelter or architectural object, but the primary site of human intimacy, memory, and imagination. By stating that the house mirrors "the topography of our intimate being," he suggests that the structure of the house its rooms, its corners, its attic and cellar is a metaphor for the layers and contours of the psyche. The house becomes a map of the self.
'Our house is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.'
In this view, to understand the world, its spaces, meanings, and emotional resonances, one must begin with the most intimate and formative space: the home. The home is where being is rooted, where memory thickens, and where the imagination is first activated. Before engaging with the vast, abstract world outside, one must consider the inward world shaped by domestic space.
' (...) all really inhabited space bears the essence of ghe notion of the home.'
Thus, the key to understanding the world is not through abstraction or rational analysis alone, but through reengaging with the places that formed us, and none more profoundly than the home. This is why Bachelard often dwells on the poetic reverie of ordinary domestic features like drawers, closets, beds, and staircases: they are vessels of lived experience and imagination.
Geographer Doreen Massey contextualizes 'home' not as static and bounded, but as a product of social interactions as part of flows, not fixities. (In: Lisa Messeri). For Massey then, you can't go home again because there is nog singular idea of home.
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