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
Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
Interpretation
Simplifying complex ideas can distort reality, but it aids in understanding different perspectives.
Gaston Bachelard suggests that while simplification of ideas or concepts can lead to an incomplete or flawed understanding of reality, it is a necessary process for gaining perspective. By breaking down complexity, we can better appreciate and analyze the world around us, but we must remain aware that these simplifications can sometimes lead us astray from the full truth.
In practice
During a presentation, I used Bachelard's quote to illustrate the importance of simplifying concepts for audience comprehension.
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.
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.
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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.
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.
The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.
Our strength lies in spiritual concepts. It lies in public sensitivities to evil. Our greatest danger is not from invading armies. Our dangers are that we may commit suicide from within by complaisance with evil, or by public tolerance of scandalous behavior.
Astronomy is a cold, desert science, with all its pompous figures,-depends a little too much on the glass-grinder, too little on the mind. 'T is of no use to show us more planets and systems. We know already what matter is, and more or less of it does not signify.
When you achieve equality, and freedom, and fairness, it's not because I grant it to you. It's because you fought for it because it is your right. This is not about benevolence or charity; it is about every human being's God-given right.
The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom return the compliment.
Identity is a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow.
The Devil has the broadest perspectives for God; therefore, he keeps so far away from God -- the Devil being the most ancient friend of wisdom
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