Since the Nobel Prize has been in the news lately, here is a related story that’s worth revisiting.  

In his acceptance speech upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, Chilean poet, writer, and diplomat Pablo Neruda transformed his dramatic ordeal through the treacherous Andes Mountains to Argentina escaping political prosecution, into a testament to the fundamentality of poetry – and subsequently art itself – in making us human and making our lives matter.

Life is lived differently by those who subsist off of their imaginations, who build out of ideas, and who thread the fine line between reality and fiction. You could even say that life is experienced differently by those for whom fiction is the best – and sometimes only – way to understand and convey what is real. But that doesn’t make them better than anybody else. “The poet is not a ‘little god’,” Neruda said. “No, he is not a ‘little god’. He is not picked out by a mystical destiny in preference to those who follow other crafts and professions.” But in not being god, the poet is instead an indispensable part of life, as Neruda explained:

“I have often maintained that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest baker who does not imagine himself to be a god. He does his majestic and unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colors and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship. And, if the poet succeeds in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an element in an immense activity, in a simple or complicated structure which constitutes the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which surround mankind, the handing over of mankind’s products: bread, truth, wine, dreams.” 

In the Orwellian world we which we appear to been drowning into, where optimism has lost its flavor and dreams seem forced, poetry – for Neruda – and fiction – for those of us who heed its call – becomes a necessity, a refuge, a lifeline to the truth, the only safe haven for the sanity of our world and our being, the integrity of our passions, and the preservation of our soul…

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The full text of Neruda’s acceptance speech can be found on the Nobel Prize’s website in the original Spanish and the English translation.