pablo neruda: keeping quiet

saturday morning. the newspaper has arrived, landing in a plastic wrapped heap in a snowdrift about a metre from the front door. coffee is gurgling away in the kitchen. everyone is still asleep. today marks the second day of the mid-winter break here in ontario. ten days in which i can resensitize myself to the matters that matter.

i begin with the the silence of the early morning - a slow unfolding moment of hazy details and unhurried movement. the small world i am immersed in softens and holds me with care. i'll be sitting in my big chair with a book in a few minutes, a cup of coffee is now resting on a nearby tabletop, i can begin to sense my self.

when neruda wrote “keeping quiet”, he had a larger world in mind in his wishing for the kind of quiet i experience in my home. his sense that “it would be a delicious moment” tells me that we connect in our knowing of the wonder, the joy that is the letting go of doing. of letting the hurry end.

keeping quiet

now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

this one time upon the earth,
let's not speak any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

it would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

the fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

what i want shouldn't be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
i want nothing to do with death.

if we weren't unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

now i will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I'll go.

-from full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon
translated by stephen mitchell


here’s an image that has been labelled as “silence”. an hdr image (a posting on hdr images is in the works) , the photographer has very generously provided a tutorial on how it was created that can be found at making of silence.