{"id":14115,"date":"2026-11-11T01:33:15","date_gmt":"2026-11-11T05:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/pablo-neruda-on-how-to-hold-time-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-11-11T01:33:15","modified_gmt":"2026-11-11T05:33:15","slug":"pablo-neruda-on-how-to-hold-time-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/pablo-neruda-on-how-to-hold-time-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Pablo<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cTime is a river that sweeps me along, but I am a river,\u201d Borges wrote<\/a>. \u201cTime is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of us are not Borges. Most of us are drowning in bewilderment at where the time goes<\/a>, burning with the urgency of being alive while waiting to start living<\/a>, wandering the labyrinth of life with wayward presence, wishing that time ran differently<\/a> as the cult of productivity turns each minute into a blade pressed against the vein of our transience.<\/p>\n

And all the while, our time is nested within our times \u2014 the epoch we are living through together, born into it with no more choice in the matter than the body and brain and family we have been born into. In his magnificent essay on Shakespeare<\/a>, James Baldwin countered the commonplace lament of every epoch: \u201cIt is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it \u2014 no time can be easy if one is living through it.\u201d A century before him \u2014 a century of unrest and transformation \u2014 Emerson issued the ultimate antilamentation: \u201cThis time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Discus chronologicus<\/em> \u2014 a German depiction of time from the early 1720s. (Available as a print<\/a> and as a wall clock<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Not knowing what to do with the time we have been given, not knowing how to hold time in our personal and political lives, is at bottom an act of forgetting how time hold us. Pablo Neruda<\/a> (July 12, 1904\u2013September 23, 1973) casts a spell against forgetting in the fourth canto of his long poem \u201cMorning,\u201d: <\/p>\n

\n

You will remember that whimsical ravine
where the vibrant aromas rose,
and from time to time a bird dressed
in water and languor: winter\u2019s garment. <\/p>\n

You will remember those gifts from the earth:
piquing fragrance, gold clay,
thickets of herbs, wild roots,
bewitching thorns like swords. <\/p>\n

You will remember the bouquet you brought,
a bouquet of shadow and silent water,
a bouquet like foam-covered stone. <\/p>\n

And that time was like never and always:
We go where nothing is expected
and find everything waiting there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pablo Neruda<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If time is the fundamental problem of human life and poetry is our most precise technology for parsing the aching astonishment of being alive, then time is the prime subject of poetry. Neruda knew this \u2014 time is the subterranean current coursing beneath his vast and varied body of work, the substrate upon which all of his stunning love poems<\/a> and his meditations on the inner life<\/a> grow. He reverenced the stones for how they have \u201ctouched time,\u201d reverenced the minute for how it is \u201cbound to join the river of time that bears us,\u201d reverenced \u201cthe inexhaustible springs of time,\u201d longed for \u201ca time complete as an ocean,\u201d then made that ocean with his poetry. <\/p>\n

In his poem \u201cThe Enigmas,\u201d composed during WWII, he writes:<\/p>\n

\n

You\u2019ve asked me what the crustacean spins
between its gold claws
and I reply: the sea knows. <\/p>\n

You wonder what the sea squirt waits for in its transparent bell?
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What does it wait for? <\/p>\n

I\u2019ll tell you: it\u2019s waiting for time like you.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A decade later, in one of his \u201cElemental Odes,\u201d Neruda laid out his most explicit instruction for how to hold time:<\/p>\n

\n

Listen and learn.
Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one
flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life.
For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
But it is yours.
Help it grow
with love, with firmness,
with stone and flight,
with resounding
rectitude,
with purest grains,
the most brilliant metal
from your heart,
walking
in the full light of day
without fear
of truth, goodness, justice,
companions of song,
time that flows
will have the shape
and sound
of a guitar,
and when you want
to bow to the past,
the singing spring of
transparent time
will reveal your wholeness.
Time is joy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Couple with three poems for trusting time<\/a>, then revisit Kahlil Gibran on how to befriend time<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTime is a river that sweeps me along, but I am a river,\u201d Borges wrote. \u201cTime is a fire that consumes me, but I am […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}