Passions and Impressions

Today, I bought a copy of "Passions and Impressions" by Pablo Neruda. Two years back, when I started this blog, I just started exploring Pablo Neruda. I read a lot about this work, Passions and Impressions. I don't remember where exactly on internet, but I did read it in bits and pieces.

This work is not his usual poetry. It's prose, or better put, poetic prose about what can be called his musings. Here are few excerpts of what I read, in couple of hours.

"I have undertaken the greatest act of self-expression: creation, hoping to illuminate words. Ten years at a solitary task, ten years that make up exactly half my life, have generated in my writing diverse rhythms, opposing currents."

"To comment on passing events is to take on a certain tone. One rolls down the incline of a personal bias and presences begin to recur: the sentimental discovery, the heartrending aspects of departing or arriving; the comedian strikes sparks, the tragedian draws blood."

"It is night, a night that arrived energetically, decisively. This night wants to lie on the ocean, a bed with no gorges, no volcanoes, no passing trains. There it snores in its freedom, without pulling up its legs at frontiers, without shrinking back at peninsulas; it sleeps, the enemy of topography as it dreams of freedom."

"Poetry is song and fertility."

This book, just reminds me that I got take my Spanish a bit more seriously. "Book of Questions" might be my first book in Spanish.. I mean, if I get hold of a bilingual edition. :)