The experience of reading

Posted by David on Tuesday, April 1, 2003 at 11:48 AM.

I've been reading Bachelard's The Poetics of Space lately. It's been a while since I've read philosophy, so it's tough going, but this resonated with me:

Paradoxically, in order to suggest the values of intimacy, we have to induce in the reader a state of suspended reading. For it is not until his eyes have left the page that recollections of my room can become a threshold of oneirism for him.

And further:

The values of intimacy are so absorbing that the reader has ceased to read your room: he sees his own again.