Henri Bachelin:
"Those were evenings when, in old houses exposed to snow and icy winds, the great stories, the beautiful legends that men hand down to one another, take on concrete meaning and, for those that delve into them, become immediately applicable. And thus it was, perhaps, that one of our ancestors, who lay dying in the year one thousand, should have come to believe in the end of the world."
The anticipation of disaster - perhaps a personal (romantic, even) catastrophe, perhaps global - is born from sensory experience, not from intelligence or theology.
Henri Bachelin, Le Serviteur, p.102. The passage was translated by Maria Jolas, around 1964, for inclusion in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. I did the painting more years ago than I care to think about.
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