Bachelard, Poetics of Space, "house and universe"

""Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons. Not only does it confer age upon our memories, taking us back to a remote past but, on snowy days, the house too is old. It is as though it were living in the past of centuries gone by. This feeling is described by Bachelin in a passage that presents winter in all its hostility, "those were evenings when, in old houses exposed to snow and icy winds, the great stories, the beautiful legends that men hand down to one another, take on concrete meaning and, for those who delve into them, become immediately applicable. And thus it was, perhaps, that one of out ancestors, who lay dying in the year one thousand, should have come to believe in the end of the world."

For here the stories that were told were not the fireside fairy tales recounted by old women; they were stories about men, stories that reflect upon forces and signs. During these winters, Bachelin writes elsewhere,"it seems to me that under the hood of the great fireplace, the old legends must have been much older than they are today," What they really had was the immemorial quality of the tragic cataclysms that can presage the end of the world."" (Bachelard)

This book continues to surprise me in its depth, its cross-references, its intuition about places, its descriptions of how it feels to live in a structure of any kind. Memory and nostalgia have become wrapped around the physical reality of places we live, places we have inhabited in our youth. These things like the quality of the light falling, or the sound of rain on the roof when we were children have infiltrated the timbers and beams of the house because they have become wound together inextricably in out memories.

I have never heard anyone else articulate this, but it resounds with me fully. When storms would roll over the Front Range in Colorado, at 12 or so, I would take my stack of books and a blanket, candles, and swaddle myself into the swing on out front porch. The house I grew up in was just the right kind of "old", 1907 I think, reddish orange brick, creaky wood floors, and the swing was pretty rough and splintery. Why I felt the need to rush outside and watch the entire storm is kind of strange, or why I was so deeply drawn to it as an event to be witnessed. I remember the smell of ozone/creosote in the air, darkening clouds through tree branches, thunder.... these sensory memories are now the shell around my childhood house. I don't remember one with out the other.

On the cusp of Spring here in New York, I feel like saying goodbye to winter, with this above passage, with gratitude to its sentiments, with memories of reading John Berger's 'Labors of the Earth' trilogy, of reading Colette's early books about her childhood home (Sido, My Mother's House), old Nordic fairytales, and a nod to the magic and alchemy of the things I have learned this winter. ***Post-note: I just learned that Rene and Agnes Mosse plant stag horns in their vineyards for certain parts of the season**** magic****!!!!!