The Child Is The Father Of The Man: Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda's Home, Isla Negra, Chile

About the poet and Literature Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda:

Pablo (born Neftali Reyes, the name under which he published his first piece at 13; a piece magnificently named "Enthusiam and Perseverance"), seems to have succeeded in carrying his childhood forward in very obvious ways.

I had the opportunity to discover that on my visits to two of his Chilean homes: one in Isla Negra and the other, La Sebastiana, in Vaparaiso. 

His home in Isla Negra, bought from a sea captain, is decorated with the surrealistic filters of a young mind who collects boundlessly for the sheer joy and necessity of it: there are his many mascarones de proa (nautical figureheads), his bottles containing sand from all over Chile, one of his desks fashioned from a wrecked boat door offered to him by the fierce Isla Negra ocean.

In both homes, there are, everywhere, what child development folks would call "transitional objects" or reflections of his favorite such objects: his childhood lamb by his Isla Negra bed, his red poncho given by his dad, the life-size wood horse (salvaged from a childhood store some 50 years beyond his passion for this very horse) who gets his own "horse room" in Isla Negra and even had its own party to celebrate its arrival. La Sebastiana also has a horse evoking the famous childhood horse: a vestige from a Parisian carousel.

The homes are best experienced, not read about, but here is a little more of what you can look forward to: images of Neruda's literary parents (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman), many other collections (colored glass, butterfiles, assorted insects, masks, sea shells) and the playful bars built in each home where he mostly served chilean wine but also his secret cocktail with orange juice, champagne, cointreau and whiskey.

For Neruda, the child was the father of the poetry. Walking from room to room, it was easy for me to imagine that he assembled the environment most propitious for his particular creativity: one where connections to his emotional childhood themes were playfully incarnated everywhere he turned.

From Pablo (or rather..from Neftali):

"A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn't play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly."

Till Later,

Anne