“A glimmer of eternity descends upon the beauty of the world. We are standing before a great lake who’s name is familiar to geographers, high in the mountains, and suddenly we are returning to a distant past. We dream while remembering. We remember while dreaming.” (Bachelard pp. 102)
One may say, “I have lived many lives”. Who is this “I” they speak of? Is it the “me-now”? Perhaps this “I” is all the pearls of “me-now” strung together by the thread of memory. Why the separation, why differentiate between self and other? I’ve heard this called the Lucifer Experiment. What more true a place of innocence (where Adam has not yet bit the apple) than that of childhood? At the nucleus of our being is the child-poet. Child-nature is a perpetual state of wonder and of dreaming that lies at the heart of every poet. In adulthood, it seems, one is always seeking to return to child-nature. When the poet seeks childhood in their reverie, they are not seeking for the memories of childhood but for the experience of childhood. They are seeking freedom! Freedom, not from the external world, but from the confines of the auto-biographical self. Reverie, by its nature, is timeless. When lost in reverie, the poet sits at the confluence of three great rivers where past, present and future coalesce. This is where the “me-now” sees with the “I” of a child-dreamer, and “A glimmer of eternity descends upon the beauty of the world.”