#Toward the splendid city pablo neruda series#

'What's the point of asking a question with no answer?' And to that, Shmoopers, we would say 'What's the sound of one hand clapping?'

#Toward the splendid city pablo neruda series#

The third poem of his Book of Questions is, much like the other 73 poems in that book, a series of strange questions that he wants to consider, but not necessarily answer.

Luckily, we have our old buddy Pablo Neruda to help out. In a world of multiple-choice tests and high-speed internet, though, this is not something that we get a chance to do very often. The point is that a koan is not an exercise in 'right' or 'wrong.' It's a chance to mediate on the world around us, to question the very nature of our surroundings. Okay, okay-we could go on for hours like this, but we'll spare you. But then, can silence be properly called a 'sound'? Isn't silence the absence of sound? Or is there, perhaps, a substance to silence that might make it a sound? Could it be something that we might be able to listen to, like we could any other sound? And if we could, then what sound would silence make for us? What should we be listening for?

So then the sound of one hand clapping would be silence. Without the second hand, there is no sound. What's the sound of one hand clapping? Well, you need two hands to clap, to make a sound. It's designed to focus the mind, to get us to dive deep and think hard about our world and the stuff that we've decided to call 'real.' Here we'll show you: That question is at the crux of a Zen koan, which is a riddle-like story or question that is designed not to solicit an easy answer, or even any answers. What's the sound of one hand clapping? If you did this, then that's the wrong answer, Shmoopers. What is The Book of Questions, III About and Why Should I Care? What might lurk beyond the things that we call 'normal,' that 'make sense'? Neruda pushes his readers past the envelope of daily (read: boring) perception, and that's what makes his Book of Questions so intriguing. Like a Zen koan, they're designed to get us to mediate on the world around us. These questions aren't designed with simple answers in mind. How can a car be a thief, anyway? But that's where Neruda has us. In the third poem of the book, Neruda asks, 'Who hears the regrets/ of the thieving automobile?' At first, we might be tempted to shrug and walk away. The poems in this book read more like little riddles, designed to get us to think about our world in ways that push beyond the borders of what we might call 'reality.' To this day, it's a best seller, and it's not hard to see why. They were published in Spanish the very next year, and poetry publishing giant Copper Canyon press put out an English translation in 1991. The book features 316 short, evocative, and open-ended questions (contained in 74 poems) and was found as a manuscript after Neruda's death in 1973. As it turns out, no evidence of that was found, but even still his poetry continues to overshadow his political legacy. It was thought that he'd been poisoned for political reasons. Just recently, in fact, Neruda's body was exhumed. Poetry was definitely his passion, but Neruda was also known for another P-word: 'politics.' In reaction to the horror of the Spanish Civil War, Neruda became an ardent and outspoken Communist, which-depending on who was running Chile-made him either a hero or a target of the government. He changed it in honor of Czech poet Jan Neruda. The guy was so into poetry that 'Pablo Neruda' is not even his real name.

Among his biggest hits are Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and 100 Love Sonnets. (So what have you been up to lately?) He continued to write poetry for the rest of his life, only taking his diplomatic job to pay the bills.

His first book of poems, Crepusculario (The Book of Twilights) came out when he was just 19. That is some One Direction-level popularity.Д«orn in 1904, Neruda was writing and publishing from an early age. While his day job had him serving as a diplomat in various Chilean consulates around the world, he was best known for his sensual and introspective love poetry, at one point drawing an audience of 100,000 people to a reading. Well, let us rephrase that: he was the Chilean poet. Are you familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda? If you answered 'no,' don't be intimidated by Bart's big brain, Shmoopers.