Beneath our anxious quickenings, beneath our fanged fears, beneath the rusted armors of conviction, tenderness is what we lengthy for — tenderness to salve our bruising contact with actuality, to heat us awake from the frozen stupor of near-living.
Tenderness is what permeates Platero and I (public library) by the Nobel-winning Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (December 23, 1881–Might 29, 1958) — half love letter to his beloved donkey, half journal of ecstatic enjoyment of nature and humanity, half fairy story for the lonely.
Residing in his birthplace of Moguer — a small city in rural Andalusia — Jiménez started composing this unusual posy of prose poems in 1907. Though it spans lower than a yr in his life with Platero, it took him a decade to publish it.
At its coronary heart is a straightforward fact: What and whom we love is a lens to focus our love of life itself.
The tenderness with which Jiménez regards Platero — whom he addresses by title time and again, like an incantation of affection — is the tenderness of residing with surprise and fragility. He celebrates Platero’s “large gleaming eyes, of a delicate firmness, during which the solar shines”; he reverences him as “good friend to the previous man and the kid, to the stream and the butterfly, to the solar and the canine, to the flower and the moon, affected person and pensive, melancholy and lovable, the Marcus Aurelius of the meadows.” He beckons him: “Include me. I’ll educate you the flowers and the celebs.”
And so he does:
Look, Platero, so many roses are falling all over the place: blue, pink, white, colorless roses… You’d suppose the sky was crumbling into roses… You’d suppose that from the seven galleries of Paradise roses had been being thrown onto the earth… Platero, it appears, whereas the Angelus is ringing, that this lifetime of ours is shedding its on a regular basis energy, and {that a} totally different energy from inside, loftier, extra fixed, and purer, is inflicting all the pieces, as if in fountain jets of grace… Your eyes, which you’ll’t see, Platero, and which you might be mildly elevating skyward, are two lovely roses.
Collectively, poet and donkey traverse the Andalusian countryside in a state of rapturous concord with one another and the residing world:
Via the low-lying roads of summer time, draped with tender honeysuckle, how sweetly we go! I learn, or sing, or recite poetry to the sky. Platero nibbles the sparse grass of the shady banks, the dusty blossoms of the mallows, the yellow sorrel. He halts greater than he walks. I let him.
[…]
Sometimes Platero stops consuming and appears at me. Sometimes I cease studying and have a look at Platero.
There are echoes of Whitman in Jiménez’s exultations:
Earlier than us are the fields, already inexperienced. Dealing with the immense, clear sky, of a blazing indigo, my eyes — so removed from my ears! — open nobly, welcoming in its calm that indescribable placidity, that harmonious, divine serenity which dwells within the limitlessness of the horizon.
This eager for the infinite accompanies the younger man and the previous donkey as they cross the hills and valleys on their each day pilgrimages:
The night extends past its regular limits, and the hour, contaminated with eternity, is infinite, peaceable, unfathomable.
Time and again, Platero’s presence magnifies the poet’s relishing of magnificence, deepens his contact with the everlasting:
I stay in ecstasy earlier than the twilight. Platero, his black eyes scarlet with sundown, walks gently to a puddle of crimson, pink, and violet waters; he softly immerses his lips into the mirrors, which appear to liquefy as he touches them.
Punctuating these ecstasies are the inevitable spells of melancholy stemming from the truth that the value of being awake to life is being additionally awake to mortality. Conscious that this enchanted life together with his beloved Platero is barely in the intervening time, Jiménez reaches into the sorrow of the longer term to consecrate it with pleasure:
Platero. I shall bury you on the foot of the massive, spherical pine within the orchard at La Piña, which you want a lot. You’ll stay alongside cheerful, serene life. The little boys will play and the little women will sew beside you on their little low chairs. You’re going to get to listen to the verses that the solitude will encourage in me. You’ll hear the older women singing once they wash garments within the orange grove, and the sound of the waterwheel shall be a pleasure and a solace to your everlasting peace. And all yr lengthy the goldfinches, greenfinches, and vireos, within the perennial freshness of the treetop, will create for you a small musical ceiling between your tranquil slumber and Moguer’s infinite, ever-blue sky.
I learn these pages considering how all the pieces we polish with consideration turns into a mirror. So too the donkey turns into a mirror for the poet’s personal soul:
Sometimes Platero stops consuming and raises his head, like me, like the ladies in Millet’s work, to the celebs, with a gentle, infinite craving.
Emanating from these vignettes is a reminder that the artwork of poetry, just like the artwork of residing, is a matter of the standard of consideration we pay to issues — a residing affirmation of Simone Weil’s insistence that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Jiménez exults:
What a morning! The solar poses its silver-and-gold cheerfulness on the earth; butterflies of 100 colours play all over the place, among the many flowers, by way of the home (now inside, now out), on the fountain. Throughout, the countryside opens up into crackings and creakings, right into a boiling of wholesome new life.
It’s as if we had been inside an enormous honeycomb of sunshine which was additionally the inside of an immense, flaming-hot rose.
One clear blue morning, the poet and the donkey encounter a gang of “treacherous boys” who’ve unfold a web to catch birds from the close by pinewood. Overcome by compassion for Platero’s “brethren of the sky,” Jiménez units out to warn the birds in a scene that, as soon as once more, ends with the infinite sympathy that flows between him and his donkey:
I mounted Platero and urged him onward with my legs, and at a pointy trot we ascended to the pinewood. Once we arrived under the shady leafy cupola, I clapped my fingers, sang, and shouted. Platero, catching the temper, brayed roughly a few occasions. And the deep, resonant echoes replied, as if from the depths of a giant nicely. The birds flew away to a different pinewood, singing.
Platero, amid the distant curses of the violent little boys, was brushing his large shaggy head towards my coronary heart, thanking me till he harm my chest.
Jiménez’s vivid sympathy with residing issues extends past the world of animals. It’s in these bonds of sympathy, of interbeing, that he finds the portal to the everlasting:
Each time I halt, Platero, I appear to be halting beneath the pine of La Corona… spreading inexperienced plentitude under the broad blue sky with white clouds… How robust I at all times really feel after I relaxation beneath its reminiscence! After I grew up, it was the one factor that didn’t stop to be large, the one factor that turned greater on a regular basis. After they reduce off that bough which the hurricane had damaged, I believed a limb of my very own had been pulled out; and at occasions, when some ache seizes on me unexpectedly, I think about that it hurts the pine of La Corona.
[…]
The phrase “nice” befits it because it does the ocean, the sky, and my coronary heart. In its shade many generations have rested, trying on the clouds, for hundreds of years, as if on the water, beneath the sky, and within the nostalgia of my coronary heart. When my ideas wander freely and the arbitrary pictures settle every time they need, or in these moments when there are issues which can be seen as if by second sight, other than that which is distinctly perceived, the pine of La Corona, transfigured into some image of eternity, involves my thoughts, extra rustling and extra gigantic but, amid my doubts, beckoning me to repose in its peace, as if it had been the true and everlasting terminus of my journey by way of life.
Timber determine amply in Jiménez’s poetic creativeness:
This tree, Platero, this acacia which I planted myself, a inexperienced flame that went on rising, spring after spring, and which now covers us with its plentiful free-growing foliage, shot by way of with the setting solar, was the perfect assist of my poetry so long as I lived on this home, now shut. Any one in every of its boughs, adorned with emerald in April or gold in October, cooled my forehead if I simply checked out it a second, just like the purest hand of a Muse.
Pulsating beneath all of the vignettes is a deep sense of the poet’s unbroken solitude — even within the firm of his donkey, even in his absolute presence with the residing world. On a late-summer Sunday, studying Omar Khayyam underneath a pine tree “filled with birds that don’t fly away” whereas the remainder of city goes to church, he writes:
Within the silence between two peals, the inside seething of the September morning acquires presence and resonance. The black-and-gold wasps fly across the grapevine laden with wholesome bunches of muscat, and the butterflies, that are confusedly mingled with the flowers, appear to be renewed, in a metamorphosis of vivid colours, as they flutter about. The solitude is sort of a nice considered mild.
It’s on this wakeful solitude amid nature that he finds what so longs for — magnificence, serenity, eternity:
How lovely the countryside is on these holidays when everybody abandons it! At most, in a younger winery, in an orchard, some previous man could also be leaning towards an unripe vine, above the pure stream… And one’s soul, Platero, feels just like the true queen of what it possesses by advantage of its emotions, of the massive wholesome physique of nature, which, when revered, offers the person who deserves it the submissive spectacle of its resplendent, everlasting magnificence.
Alongside Jiménez’s reverence of the everlasting is his elegy for the passage of time, for the aching fantastic thing about our mortal transience. When autumn comes, he writes:
Platero, the solar is already beginning to really feel too lazy to get out of its sheets, and the farmers are up sooner than he’s… On the broad, moist path the yellow bushes, positive that they’ll be inexperienced once more, brightly mild our fast journey on each side, like gentle bonfires of clear gold.
[…]
These are the instants during which life is solely contained within the departing gold…. Magnificence makes everlasting this fleeting second with out heartbeat, as if everlastingly useless whereas nonetheless alive.
Time and again, Jiménez syncopates between exultation and lament:
See how the setting solar, manifesting itself giant and scarlet, as a visual god, attracts to itself the ecstasy of all issues and, within the strip of sea behind Huelva, sinks into absolutely the silence that the world — that’s, Moguer, its countryside, you, and I, Platero — pay to it in homage.
Time and again, he returns to the fundamental fact of being, present in each flower and in each star — that to be alive simply this second, any second, is sufficient, is eternity:
Platero, Platero! I’d give my entire life and I’d lengthy so that you can need to give yours, in change for the purity of this deep January night time, lonely vivid, and agency.
When Platero does ultimately give his life, the poet meets his loss of life with the identical largehearted eager for the everlasting that lives in all the pieces ephemeral. Visiting Platero’s grave with the village kids that had so liked him, he writes:
“Platero, my good friend!” I stated to the earth. “If, as I imagine, you at the moment are in a meadow in heaven, carrying adolescent angels in your shaggy again, are you able to maybe have forgotten me? Platero, inform me: do you continue to keep in mind me?”
And, as if in reply to my query, a weightless white butterfly, which I had by no means seen earlier than, fluttered persistently, like a soul, from iris to iris.
The closing pages turn out to be half rhapsody and half requiem, concentrating and consecrating the tenderness that had scored the poet’s life together with his donkey:
Candy trotting Platero, my little donkey who carried my soul so typically — solely my soul! — over these low-lying roads of prickly pears, mallows, and honeysuckles; to you I dedicate this e-book which speaks of you, now which you could perceive it.
Couple the soul-slaking Platero and I with the bittersweet story of Civilón — the real-life Spanish bull who impressed the beloved kids’s e-book Ferdinand.
