ABSTRACT

Second, I explore how young children’s sense of space and place can be infused with their past associations with that environment (as first discussed in Chapter 1.2). This theme links with Bachelard’s notion of ‘compressed time’:

At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability – a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to ‘suspend’ its flight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.