Parenting & Family Quote by Gaston Bachelard

Bachelard smuggles an entire theory of memory into an image that feels almost domestic: fire left unattended, not extinguished. “Forgotten” is the sting here. Childhood isn’t framed as lost, processed, or nobly overcome; it’s merely misfiled. That choice turns nostalgia into something less like a scrapbook and more like a latent element, an embered substance in the psyche that can reignite without permission.

The line’s power sits in its double motion: “within us” makes childhood interior and ongoing, but “flare up” makes it unruly. A flare is brief, bright, and hard to ignore; it interrupts adult self-control with heat and light. Bachelard isn’t romanticizing innocence so much as warning that the past persists as an energetic force. Your most polished present tense can still be punctured by a smell, a room’s light, a winter afternoon - triggers that don’t “remind” you so much as reactivate you.

Context matters: Bachelard’s philosophical project often treated imagination as a real way we inhabit the world, not a decorative afterthought. In his work on elemental images (fire, water, air), he argues that matter and reverie collaborate in making experience. So this isn’t psychoanalytic confession; it’s phenomenology with a poet’s matchstick. Childhood becomes the original fuel source of our metaphors and desires, capable of sudden combustion - not because we failed to grow up, but because growing up never fully seals the hearth.