Thinking of silence and listening, I was reminded yesterday of Pablo Neruda’s poem “Keeping Quiet.” Zookeeper, housekeeper, storekeeper, goalkeeper — to be a keeper of something is to care for it, to protect it. This is a helpful reminder that silence and the deep listening it invites are not just something we luckily happen upon but something we can intentionally choose, something in which we can consciously participate, and something we can perpetuate in our lives and where we go throughout the day. What might it mean and what might it involve if we were stewards of quiet, guardians of silence?
Neruda says that to choose to be quiet involves choosing to be still. “It would be a delicious moment,” he muses, so starved are we for its presence. He also knows it would make us uncomfortable because we are so used to its absence. The poet contrasts keeping quiet not so much with noise but with constant movement and speed, exposing one of the most costly assumptions of our time: faster is better. Keeping quiet, if only “for one second,” shines a light on the contemporary anesthetic of choice: “keeping our lives in so much motion.” As if we could save time and outrun our pain by moving faster, motion and acceleration become the promoters of inattentiveness and numbness, warding off the daily harm in which we are complicit and hiding the sadness of inauthenticity that lies just below the surface. Neruda suggests hush over rush might do the earth some good, the same earth that if we were quiet might have something to say to us about how we might choose life, quit death, and be healed.

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

-from Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon
Translated by Stephen Mitchell