P.28 we are never real historians, but always near poets,
P.33 And what a dynamic, handsome object is a path!
P.48 When insomnia, which is the philosopher’s ailment, is increased through irritation caused by city noises; or when, late at night, the hum of automobiles and trucks rumbling through the place Maubert causes me to curse my city-dweller’s fate, I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean. We all know that the big city is a clamorous sea, and it has been said countless times that, int he heart of night in Paris, one hears the ceaseless murmur of flood and tide.
P.95 DRAWERS, CHEST AND WARDROBES
P.102 An anthology devoted to small boxes, such as chests and caskets, would constitute an important chapter in psychology. These complex pieces that a craftsman creates are very evident witnesses of the need for secrecy, of an intuitive sense off hiding-places. It is not merely a matter of keeping a possession well guarded. The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold. And how it defies indiscretion when it is covered with ornaments! What “complexes” are attached to an ornamented lock!
P.106 Chests, especially small caskets, over which we have more complete mastery, are objects that may be opened. When a casket is closed, it is returned to the general community of objects; it takes its place in exterior space. But it opens!
P.109 He who buries a treasure buries himself with it.
P.125 SHELLS
A poet naturally understands this aesthetic category of life,
P.126 Actually, however, life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself. But what a marvellously insidious, subtle image of life a coiling vital principle would be! And how many dreams the leftward oriented shell, or one that did not conform to the rotation of its species, would inspire!
P.132 We have seen how freely the imagination acts upon space, time and elements of power.but the action of the imagination is not limited to the level of images. On the level of ideas too, it tends toward extremes, and there are ideas that dream. For instance, certain theories which were once thought to be scientific are, in reality, vast, boundless daydreams.
… which takes the shell as the clearest proof of life’s ability to constitute forms. …
… We might say that the inside of a man’s body is an assemblage of shells. Each organ has its own causality, that has already been tried out during the long centuries when nature was teaching herself to make man, with one shell or another. The function constructs its form from old models, and life, although only partial, constructs its abode the way the shell-fish constructs its shell.
If one can succeed in reliving this partial life, in the precision of a life that endows itself with a form, the being that possesses form dominates thousands of years. For every form retains life, and a fossil is not merely a being that once lived, but one that is still alive, asleep in its form. The shell is the most obvious example of a universal shell oriented life.
P.134 But if we were to allow ourselves to indulge in all the daydreams of inhabited stone there would be no end to it. Curiously enough, these daydreams are at once long and brief. It is possible to go on with them forever, and yet reflection can end them with a single word.
P.135 But a dreamer is unable to believe that the work is finished when the walls are built, and thus it is that shell-constructing dreams give life and action to highly geometrically associated molecules. For these dreams, the shell, in the very tissue of its matter, is alive. Proof of this may be found in a great natural legend.
P.142 To live alone; there’s a great dream! The most lifeless, the most physically absurd image, such as that of living in a shell, can see as origin of such a dream. For it is a dream that, in life’s moments of great sadness, is shared by everybody, both weak and strong, in revolt against the injustices of men and of fate. As, for instance, Saladin, a weak, sad creature, who takes comfort in his narrow room precisely because it is narrow and permits him to say: “What would I do if I hadn’t this little room, this room that is as deep and secret as a shell? Ah! Snails don’t realise their good fortune.”
P.155 CORNERS
P.157 “Suddenly, a room with its lamp appeared to me, was almost palpable in me. I was already a corner in it, but the shutters sensed me and closed.”
P.200 INTIMATE IMMENSITY
P.208 When a relaxed spirit meditates and dreams, immensity seems to expect images of immensity. The mind sees and continues to see objects, while the spirit finds the nest of immensity in an object.
P.217 But when a poet knows that a living thing in the world is in search of its soul, this means that he is in search of his own. “A tall shuddering tree always moves the soul.”