…a continuation of post #17.

Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond stands as a kind of domestic proto-manifest destiny: the thinness of the envelope he builds for himself allows for a psychological and physiological closeness to the environment.  Thoreau presents his hut as painfully obligatory: he didn’t plaster his walls until November, allowing the wind and weather to pass between the boards and through the cabin, on cleaning day he loves seeing his things in the sunlight outside his cabin, delaying the task of putting them back inside as long as possible. Pollan points out that this desire to fling out is in direct opposition to the mindset of Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, in which the comforting hearth-enclosure of the home is most prize. He posits that Thoreau represents an American domestic manifest destiny toward the exterior, while Bachelard represents an European interiority.

America’s trips to the moon in the late 60’s and the early 70’s could be read as an ultimate manifestation of manifest destiny.  It is fitting that the skins of spacecraft seem periliously thin, given the hostile environment they must protect against.  The image in my mind then is Bachelard’s warm Poetic Space infinately small against the relentless wilderness of outer space.  A tension between the sustaining, coddling environment of the craft and the thinness of enclosure it offers is maybe the ultimate expression of American domesticity?

I should re-read Walden (since the last time I read it was like 8th grade) actually finish The Poetics of Space…