Explore "Animal of Light" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I am in this endless lack of solitude an animal of light corralled by his mistakes and by his foliage: the forest is wide: here my brother creatures swarm, back away, or roam around, while I retreat accompanied by the escort that time chooses: waves of the sea, stars of the night.
It is small, it is wide, scarce and is everything.
My eyes from looking into so many eyes and my mouth from so many kisses, from having swallowed the smoke of those trains that vanished: the old merciless stations and the dust of countless bookshops, the man I am, the mortal, weary of eyes, of kisses, of smoke, of roads, tired of books thicker than the earth.
And today, deep in the lost forest he hears the rustling of the enemy and flees not from the others but from himself, from the interminable conversation, from the choir that used to sing with us, and from the meaning of life.
Because one moment, because one voice, because one syllable or the passing of one silence or the undying sound of the wave leave me face to face with the truth, and there is nothing left to decipher, nothing more to say: that was all: the doors of the forest are closed, the sun circles opening the leaves, the moon rises like a white fruit, and man suits himself to his destiny.