Keeping Quiet (Pablo Neruda) — NCERT Solutions

Given / Context: The poet Pablo Neruda asks everyone to count up to twelve and keep quiet for a moment.

Answer:

Counting up to twelve (which takes just a few seconds) and keeping still will give us a rare moment of complete silence and inactivity. During this brief pause, we will stop all our noisy, rushed, and often harmful activities — wars, exploitation of nature, and the relentless pursuit of selfish goals. This sudden stillness will allow us to:

1. Introspect — understand ourselves and each other better.
2. Break the cycle of violence and destruction — men engaged in wars and harmful activities will pause and reflect.
3. Experience a sense of togetherness — people will feel united in shared silence rather than divided by conflict.
4. Interrupt the 'sadness' — the sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death will be momentarily broken.

In short, this brief, exotic moment of stillness will bring peace, self-awareness, and a sense of brotherhood among all human beings.

Given / Context: The poet says, "What I want should not be confused with total inactivity."

Answer:

No, the poet does not advocate total inactivity or death. He makes this absolutely clear in the poem itself when he says:

> "What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about; I want no truck with death."

Neruda only asks for a brief, momentary pause — the time it takes to count to twelve. He wants people to stop their destructive, harmful, and mindless activities for just a moment so that they can reflect and reconnect with themselves and with nature.

He is, in fact, a champion of life, not death. He believes that if human beings slow down and stop their self-destructive rush, they will understand life better and value it more. The stillness he advocates is not the stillness of death but the stillness of deep reflection and inner peace — the kind of stillness that the Earth itself demonstrates when everything seems dead in winter but is actually alive underneath, waiting to bloom again.

Given / Context: The poet writes — "perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death."

Answer:

The 'sadness' the poet refers to is the deep, collective sorrow that arises from two interlinked failures of human beings:

1. The failure to understand ourselves: Human beings are so caught up in the mad rush of modern life — in their ambitions, conflicts, and routines — that they never pause to reflect on who they truly are, what they truly want, or what the purpose of their existence is. This lack of self-awareness is a profound sadness.

2. Threatening ourselves with death: Despite being the most intelligent creatures on Earth, human beings constantly threaten their own existence through wars (wars with gas, wars with fire), destruction of nature, and other violent activities. The irony of a species that is intelligent enough to create but chooses to destroy is deeply sad.

Thus, the 'sadness' is the tragedy of human existence — our inability to know ourselves and our tendency to move towards self-destruction rather than harmony and peace.