When Andreas was a child he had asked his mother where he had come from. And his mother answered him by showing him the well near their house. In his solitudes, the child returned to the well. His reveries in front of the well would sound the origins of his being. The child's mother would come and tear him away from this obsssion with the origin, this obsession with the water lost in the depths of the earth. The well is too strong an image for a dreaming child.
-- Karl Philipp Moritz Andreas Hartknopf
When, at the pinnacle of age, at the end of age, one sees such reveries, he draws back a bit, for he recognizes that childhood is the well of being. Dreaming this way about unfathomable childhood which is one archetype, I am well aware that I am taken by another archetype. The well is an archetype, one of the gravest images of the human soul.
-- Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Reverie
Translated by Daniel Russell
