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Q.'There can be life under apparent stillness'. Explain. (Keeping Quiet)

CBSECBSE Class XII Board 2023Subjective· 2mImportance★★★★★
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The line means that silence and inaction are not the same as death or emptiness — beneath a quiet surface, life continues to breathe, grow, and renew itself.

Pablo Neruda’s poem Keeping Quiet is not a call for permanent stillness but for a deliberate pause — a moment of collective introspection. When he writes “there can be life under apparent stillness,” he is challenging our modern obsession with constant motion and noise. We have come to believe that activity equals progress, that noise equals vitality. Neruda asks us to reconsider.

Think of a forest in winter. To a casual observer, it looks dead — bare branches, frozen ground, no birdsong. But beneath the snow, roots are alive, seeds are waiting, and the soil teems with microbial activity. The stillness is not an absence of life; it is life in a different rhythm. Neruda uses this natural image to suggest that human beings, too, can be alive and growing even when they are not visibly doing, speaking, or producing.

The poem was written in the shadow of the Cold War, when the world was divided by frantic ideological competition. Neruda saw that this relentless rush — to build more weapons, to shout louder, to win at any cost — was leading humanity toward self-destruction. He proposes a different kind of strength: the courage to be still. In that stillness, he argues, we might actually understand each other better. We might stop long enough to feel empathy, to recognise that the fisherman who kills the whale and the whale itself are both part of the same fragile world.

Note

Neruda is not advocating for laziness or permanent silence. He explicitly says, “I want no truck with death.” The stillness he speaks of is a temporary, voluntary pause — like counting to twelve — after which we resume life with greater awareness. …

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