Last Neruda that I'll read is my favorite one in the book.
And it's written during the space race.
And Neruda spend some time meeting cosmonauts.
In fact he's got a crush on the cosmonaut, Valentina
Tereshkova.
[LAUGHTER]
He's got a crush on everybody.
But so this is sort of the really,
he's writing at the first imagination of humans
being in space.
"Those two solitary men, those first men, up there.
What of ours did they bring with them?
What from us, the men of Earth?
It occurs to me that the light was fresh then.
That an unwinking star journeyed along,
cutting short and linking distances.
Their faces unused to the awesome desolation in space.
Among astral bodies, polished and glistening,
like grass at dawn, something new came from the Earth.
Wings or bull bone coldness, enormous drops of water
were surprised thoughts-- a strange bird throbbing
to the distant human heart.
And not only that, but cities, smoke,
the roar of crowds, bells and violins, the
feet of children leaving school-- all of that
is alive in space now, from now on.
Because the astronauts didn't go by themselves.
They brought our Earth--
the odors of moss and forest, love,
the crisscrossed limbs of men and women,
terrestrial rains over the prairies.
Something floated up like a wedding dress
behind the two spaceships.
It was our spring on earth, blooming
for the first time, that conquered an inanimate heaven,
depositing, in those altitudes, the seed of our kind."
And I think that's about 40 minutes.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]