A Burning Patience

Last week, I wrote about my journey with loneliness. I’m currently sitting at Urban Grind coffeehouse in Atlanta. The walls are painted my favorite dark red. The bay windows look out on a busy, shaded street. I just finished writing a blog post for the Burlington Writers Workshop on practices I’ve picked up from books about how to write well. As I was brainstorming for the post, I remembered sitting in another coffee shop three years ago in Brooklyn. It was a much smaller cafe than this one. I was sitting towards the back of its narrow corridor-shape, reading a copy of Pablo Neruda’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature: Towards the Splendid City. It includes an interesting take on what it is to write poetry, so I looked it up again today. There, I found these gems:

“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 and sing our sorrowful song – but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.” -Pablo Neruda

Also: “…only with a burning patience can we conquer the Splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind.” -Pablo Neruda

 

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