The emotional biography of our childhood
homes goes beyond the architectural envelopes they provide for our mentalized
and un-mentalized erotic, hostile, tender, civic, and spiritual aspirations.
Internalized, their corridors, closets, and cloisters function as life-long
psychic retreats and springboards for mental rejuvenation. Driven by naive
hope, we visit them in actuality and come back wounded. But then the plump
nursemaid of nostalgia leads us back to those very streets and lampposts and we
return with a poem in our hands. As we grow old, life's intoxication gradually
changes into tipsy indifference, but arriving at our eternal resting place we
are unexpectedly clear-eyed. We see that we have ended up where we started
from. Our childhood homes might have been lost but childhood itself has turned
out to be our home. Loyally and forever.
Poetics of Space territory, probably, although I understood so little of that book that it's difficult to know whether I can legitimately site it.
Just noticed the reference to 'cloisters' - anyone grow up around one of those?
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