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In his book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard talks about the house of childhood, the house we never leave because at first we live in it, and afterwards it lives on in us. The house of childhood organizes our experience, first of all determining inside and outside, and then offering middle terms: the front porch and its steps are a middle term between the house and the town, while the back yard and garden are a middle term between the house and the wild. It organizes what is far away, both because we measure "away" by how far it is from home, how many hours or days of travel. Moreover, the windows of the house let in the distances, the dwindling train tracks, river or road, the fields and forest, even the cloudy-blue or starry heavens: they are set squarely on the walls within the window-frames, as light comes through and we see what is outside. The infinite or limitless is framed or mapped, a kind of compactification. (We"ll look into middle terms and compactification later.) The house also organizes time, for what lives in the basement or the attic? We ourselves do not eat or sleep or socialize there, although those rooms are part of the house: it is where we put the past, the discarded and the treasured. It is also where sometimes we put the might-have-been, the unrealized possibles. So, finally, the house invites playing. The play room (the nursery, as one used to call it) with its gate, and the fenced-in part of the back yard that displays and bars the wild, are enclosures where the toys are kept and where children go about their business of imitating the adult activities of building and furnishing houses, admonishing and encouraging their dolls, rushing about on small basketball courts and soccer pitches, setting forth amidst the ceremonies of departure and return, celebrating holidays, those middle terms between time and eternity that punctuate and organize the human year (Bachelard 1969).

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-98231-1_1

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