Dream House Part I: Nests

"If we go deeper into daydreams of nests, we soon encounter a sort of paradox of sensibility.  A nest--and this we understand right away---is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security.  Why does this obvious precariousness not arrest daydreams of this kind?  The answer to this paradox is simple: when we dream...in a sort of naive way, we relive the instinct of the bird, taking pleasure in accentuating the mimetic features of the green nest in green leaves.  We definitely saw it, but we say that it is well hidden.  This center of animal life is concealed by the immense volume of vegetable life.  The nest is a lyrical bouquet of leaves...when we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence.  Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?"

---Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The next few entries will feature utopian homes.  In this entry taken from philosopher Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, the nest is not simply a dream home, but a home that catalyzes reveries of security, in spite of its essential insecurity.    The nest of the real world--constructed of natural ephemera---is fragile and vulnerable.  Yet the nest exists not only in the real world but in our imagination as an ideal space that is protective and intimate as well as open and ethereal. 

A few days ago, I saw a broken egg on the cement beneath a tree. But this disturbing sight conjured the nest from which it had came and then, comically, the Swiss Family Robinson (a family in a nest in a tree) and finally a house on a mountain top. To reside on top of the world, surrounded by a "lyrical bouquet of leaves,"  would be the ultimate domesticity. Cosmic....confidence!