Rise Up to the Light of the Universe

On The Twilight Zone, Youth and Pablo Neruda's Canto General: Song of the Americas

First aired on November 20th, 1959, "Time Enough At Last" is the title of one of the most famous The Twilight Zone episodes. In it bespectacled, severely far-sighted bank teller Henry Bemis lives a life of despair and deprivation, his job unsatisfying, his wife cruel and loveless, his entire existence meek. Only literature provides Henry solace; within imaginative language he is able to possess an identity that reality refuses him entirely. But such a freedom regularly eludes Bemis's grasp; he has bank-telling to do and his spouse to grapple with, among many other things. For Henry, life is always elsewhere.

And then the nuclear bomb explosion, the eradication of all life in the United States and possibly the world, and, due to his being in the steel-bars-thick bank vault during the bomb's detonation, Henry wholly uninjured. He's safe—but despondent. Death kingly reigns everywhere and such chaos, still incinerating, is no way to live. Just as Henry sticks the revolver to his head, though, he sees the ruins of the public library in the distance. Upon closer inspection the library is decimated but the books live on—and now Henry will be able to live inside them to his heart's everlasting content! Nothing can stop him now from literature, his reading, the only shine that ever truly lit Henry's life.

As he goes to pick up the first book in the never-ending list of books he'll soon read, however, Henry stumbles, breaking his glasses as a result of his fall. And suddenly all that's seen are the blurs of blindness that he won't ever be able to see his way out of. Camera panning out, the viewer is only left with Henry's howled anguish: "That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was—was all the time I needed…! It's not fair! It's not fair!"

You, Mr. Neruda, didn't see "Time Enough At Last," or at least there's no record of your doing so. Look, I know I'm skimming your surface of self here in order to make my own personal connection. Grasping at directness, I know that. It's just that when I read the below stanza

Thus was my poetry born, barelyout of the nettles, wieldedover solitude like a punishment,or its most secret flower segregatedin the garden of shamelessness until buried.And so isolated like the darkest waterof the deepest trenches,I fled from hand to hand, to eachbeing's alienation, to daily loathing.I knew that was how others lived, keepinghalf of themselves hidden, like fishfrom the remotest seas, and encountereddeath in the murky depths.Death opening doors and roads.Death slithering across the walls.

from your poem "The Poet" in Canto General: Song of the Americas, I think of Henry Bemis and I think of you and your poetry and your life and what's fair vs. what's isolated terrible a-lonely, terrible a-lonely. The "daily loathing" that, miraculously, we sometimes get to escape from via our art or our love or our deaths. Where did Henry go once the cameras were turned off, the set and soundstage demolished? As I write this now, forty-four years after your own passing, where are you, your heart a mound of sickly ash, your words left everywhere behind. Where did you go?

________

"You're going to review a Neruda book? That's like trying to review Homer or Ecclesiastes or something. That's like trying to review the dawn after you've been up all night with someone you just realized you're completely, hopelessly in love with. Or something."

________

An article published in The New York Times on October 21, 2017 with the headline "Cancer Didn't Kill Pablo Neruda, Panel Finds. Was It Murder?" The article's first four paragraphs read:

SANTIAGO, Chile—The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, a...