Now I can write

September 4. 

It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth. All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.

Improve the suggestion of each object however humble, however slight and transient the provocation. It is a wise man and experienced who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad objects have each suggested something,

Probe the universe in a myriad points You must try a thousand themes before you find the right one, as nature makes a thousand acorns to get one oak.

I feel myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work, but I can select no work. Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression.

I am prepared not so much for contemplation, as for forceful expression. I am braced both physically and intellectually It is not so much the music as the marching to the music that I feel. I feel that the juices of the fruits which I have eaten, the melons and apples, have ascended to my brain and are stimulating it. They give me a heady force. 

Now I can write.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 4-7, 1851

The perception of truth. See February 27, 1851("a novel and grand surprise, or a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before; an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe.”); April 19 1852 ("How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact! suggesting what worlds remain to be unveiled. That phenomenon of the andromeda seen against the sun cheers me exceedingly. When the phenomenon was not observed, it was not at all. I think that no man ever takes an original or detects a principle, without experiencing an inexpressible, as quite infinite and sane, pleasure, which advertises him of the dignity of that truth he has perceived.”); June 19, 1852 (“Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth.”); August 8, 1852 ("No man ever makes a discovery, even an observation of the least importance, but he is advertised of the fact by a joy that surprises him."); September 2, 1856 (" I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood, . . . I am prepared for strange things.”); November 1, 1857 ("A higher truth, though only dimly hinted at, thrills us"); November 4, 1858 ("We cannot see any thing until we are possessed with the idea of it.”); January 5, 1860 ("A man receives only what he is ready to receive. His observations make a chain. He does not observe the phenomenon that cannot be linked with the rest which he has observed, however novel and remarkable it may be. A man tracks himself through life, apprehending only what he already half knows.”); August 22, 1860 ("I never find a remarkable Indian relic but I have first divined its existence, and planned the discovery of it."); November 25, 1860 ("How is any scientific discovery made ? Why, the discoverer takes it into his head first. He must all but see it.")

 

Now I can write. See September 2, 1851 ("A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.”); August 2, 1854 ("Fields to-day sends me a specimen copy of my "Walden." It is to be published on the 12th inst.”). See also Tonight I Can Write:

 Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.


~ Pablo Neruda, translated by W.S. Merwin