By Brendon Sylvester
When I visited the Netherlands at 10 years old, the things that impressed themselves most strongly on my memory were not the tulip gardens or the ape sanctuary.
What I remember was the way that ordinary spaces felt alien from my home in California. At my aunt’s house in Harderwijk, I marveled at how steep the stairs were and how all the bedrooms had sloped ceilings. The whole country was so flat that there were more cyclists on the road than motorists. It was these observations that made the Netherlands feel like another world.
Children, it seems to me, have a particular tendency to wonder at spaces. A French philosopher from the early 1900s named Gaston Bachelard contends that the childhood home is so formative that it becomes a defining structure in the imagination. The physical spaces in our childhood houses—where we have experienced boredom or solitude or reverie—become structures that hold memories of those same emotions in our imaginations for the rest of our lives.
To a child, the imaginative act of organizing colors and shapes into a sense of space is still a new ability. It is easy for children to wonder at everything. Adults are used to the ways their imagination composes space. If a grownup is going to recover that childlike wonder, he or she will have to do it deliberately, by daydreaming.
“If a grownup is going to recover that childlike wonder, he or she will have to do it deliberately, by daydreaming.”
One of Bachelard’s central contentions is that a space people daydream in soon becomes a space they daydream about. If they daydream in a space, that space will begin to contain associated thoughts and feelings, and it will also shape their understanding of form and beauty. To daydream well, one needs the time to daydream—any amount of unpressured time (the rarest kind) will do—and a space of solitude, light, and beauty where one can do his daydreaming.
Distinct Spaces
I can recount experiences with two such spaces. One was the Pusey House library at Oxford. Another was a somewhat ugly lobby at the university where I teach.
A Library at Oxford
Pusey Library at Oxford (Image Credits)
I would not have found the Pusey House library if my professor had not told me to look for it. The room itself has a wooden rounded vault for a ceiling, and along each wall are tall arched windows overlooking on one side a grassy courtyard enclosed by castelline walls. Each desk sits in its own little cubby, with bookshelves forming the dividing walls.
When I sat at one of those desks with a cup of tea and stared out of the window into the courtyard, I was away from the world. I was removed from what I could see out of the window because I was upstairs in an out-of-the-way, sparsely populated, and quiet space. The stone, the wood, the desks, the chairs, the stacks of books, and the sunlight pouring in through arched windows, removed me not only from the bustle of the university, but from the movement of time.
My daydreams in that space were of timeless and intimate solitude. The age of the library itself gave me the sense that its beauty has roots planted deep in time—that the truth to which that space was dedicated was a solid and permanent thing.
An Office Park Lobby
The little college where I now teach does not have particularly beautiful buildings—they are in that sterile 20th-century style that characterizes most office parks. Even so, I found in one oddly shaped lobby a space ideal for daydreaming. I was struck by the vast stillness of the space. The wall on my left had one great window on the ground floor and broad, horizontal windows the rest of the way up. The interior walls were long stretches of blank white space. On my righthand side were balconies at each of the building’s three floors where students spoke in hushed tones, though they had no reason to be quiet. It was as though they were afraid to disturb the stillness of the space.
The whole room (though it felt too vast to be called a “room”) was lit by sunlight from those big windows, and the entire atmosphere gave rise to daydreams of a kind of lazy driftlessness.
I sat there in the vast, blank, and sunlit room feeling still and small. The daydream that I fell into was much more about the present and future than the past—the aimlessness of my generation, and images of a pretend infinite technologies and advertisements, all had something of the feel of those endless walls.
Distinct spaces hold distinct kinds of beauty and give rise to different kinds of daydreams. The Pusey library became a synthesizing structure in my memory that helps me conceive of my place in relation to the past, but that lobby helps me conceive of the present and future.
God’s Imminence
Why should we recover childlike wonder of space, deliberately, by daydreaming in a space of solitude, light, and beauty?
In all this, daydreaming affirms the imminence of God. Every space may cultivate in its beholder a delight in its special kind of beauty, and consequently an ability to imagine the many facets of God’s beauty.
“Daydreaming affirms the imminence of God.”
And if our imaginations are full of pictures, literally housed in the places we daydream, then to daydream in ordinary space is simply to allow time for beauty in the places we encounter to reshape the walls and windows of our imaginations, so that our minds can better know the manifold beauty of God.
Brendon Sylvester is an Anglican Christian poet and writer. He is currently an adjunct professor at Cairn University. He likes The Faerie Queene and hiking. And he is currently teaching himself the banjo and can play "wagon wheel" with moderate success. You can read more of his work and contact him through his substack.