During my recent visit to Iowa City, I spent a considerable amount of time reading and thinking and browsing the shelves in IC's famous bookstore, Prairie Lights, the companion bookstore to San Francisco's famous City Lights. While here, I scored a major reading spot in the window overlooking Linn Street--a perfect perch for my Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space which is proving enormously helpful in my ongoing thinking about Robert Louis Stevenson vis-a-vis Henri Bergson (see link to my journal article here: “Softened with time”: A (Proto) Bergsonian Metaphysics in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).
Bachelard's philosophical inquiry into spacial poetics is a beautiful interrogation of architecture, beauty, the quest for human meaning, and the necessity of shelter. I am finding many connections also to my dissertation chapter on Lewis Carroll's Alice books and their Wittgensteinian riddles. More analysis to come...
