"In my Paris apartment, when a neighbor drives nails into the wall at an undue hour, I "naturalize" the noise by imagining that I am in my house in D… - Gaston Bachelard

And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

El sueño de la noche no nos pertenece. No es nuestra propiedad. Para nosotros es un raptor, el más desconcertante de los raptores: nos arrebata nuestro ser. Las noches no tienen historia. No se ligan unas a otras. Y cuando se ha vivido mucho, cuando ya se han vivido unas veinte mil noches, nunca sabemos en qué noche antigua, muy antigua, hemos partido hacia el sueño. La noche no tiene futuro. Sin duda, hay noches menos negras en las que nuestro ser del días vive aún bastante como para negociar con sus recuerdos.