Intimate Immensity Summary and Analysis

Bachelard considers immensity to be a philosophical category of daydream because it moves the dreamer into the world of infinity. Quiet daydreaming opens to the immensity within ourselves that is an expansion of being to a motionless man.

The inner immensity of man paradoxically gives meaning to expressions such as the immensity of the forest that, for example, allows one to go deeper and deeper into the grandeur of an apparently limitless world. Old forests in particular seem infinite within their own boundaries. The deep forest offers inner peace. Bachelard cautions against using the adjective "ancestral" in a study of poetic phenomenology because it is too easily used and explains nothing. Forests are not young since they come from a past, unlike fields and meadows that are in the present.

When one becomes absorbed in daydreaming, details lessen and...