Introduction: Dismantling Mantelpieces

Abstract

One winter’s night, a few years ago, I was sitting in front of some programme or other on the television, too lazy or tired to do anything else. Yawning as yet another advert break interrupted my entertainment, I glanced idly to the left, at the mantelpiece above the unlit gas fire. I had seen it ten thousand times – without really seeing it – but on that night, I looked at it as if for the first time.

Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness.

(Bachelard 1994 [1958]: 155)