Against the Illusion of Separateness: Pablo Neruda’s Beautiful and Humanistic Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. BY MARIA POPOVA
“There is no
insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others
what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and
silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our
clumsy dance…”
By the time he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature less than two years before his death,
Neruda had become an icon. Gabriel García Márquez, whose own subsequent Nobel
Prize acceptance speech echoed Neruda’s humanistic ideals, considered
him “the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language.” On December 13, 1971,
Neruda took the podium in Stockholm to deliver an extraordinary acceptance
speech, later included in Nobel Lectures in Literature, 1968–1980 (public library). He begins with a lyrical, almost
cinematic recollection of his 1948 escape to Argentina through a mountain pass
when Chile’s dictatorial government issued an order for his arrest on account
of his extreme leftist politics — a long, trying journey which embodied for the
poet “the necessary components for the making of the poem.” He recounts:
Down there on those
vast expanses in my native country, where I was taken by events which have
already fallen into oblivion, one has to cross, and I was compelled to cross,
the Andes to find the frontier of my country with Argentina. Great forests make
these inaccessible areas like a tunnel through which our journey was secret and
forbidden, with only the faintest signs to show us the way.
There were no
tracks and no paths, and I and my four companions, riding on horseback, pressed
forward on our tortuous way, avoiding the obstacles set by huge trees,
impassable rivers, immense cliffs and desolate expanses of snow, blindly
seeking the quarter in which my own liberty lay. Those who were with me knew
how to make their way forward between the dense leaves of the forest, but to
feel safer they marked their route by slashing with their machetes here and
there in the bark of the great trees, leaving tracks which they would follow
back when they had left me alone with my destiny.
Each of us made his
way forward filled with this limitless solitude, with the green and white
silence of trees and huge trailing plants and layers of soil laid down over
centuries, among half-fallen tree trunks which suddenly appeared as fresh
obstacles to bar our progress. We were in a dazzling and secret world of nature
which at the same time was a growing menace of cold, snow and persecution. Everything
became one: the solitude, the danger, the silence, and the urgency of my
mission.
Through this dangerous
and harrowing journey, Neruda arrived at “an insight which the poet must learn
through other people” — a profound understanding of the inter-connectedness of
each life with every other, echoing his childhood
revelation about the purpose of art. In consonance with the
Lebanese-American poet and painter Kahlil Gibran’s insight
into why we create, Neruda writes:
There is no
insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal:.. read more:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/08/30/pablo-neruda-nobel-lecture/Niels Bohr on Subjective vs. Objective Reality and the Uses of Religion in a Secular World
Physics and Beyond, though out of print, is a
fascinating read in its totality and well worth the search for a surviving
copy. Complement this particular portion with pioneering nineteenth-century
astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science, on our
conquest of truth, Carl Sagan on science
and spirituality, Richard Feynman on why
uncertainty is essential for morality, Simone de Beauvoir on the
moral courage of atheism, Alan Lightman on transcendent
experiences in the secular world, and Sam Harris on spirituality
without religion.
see also
