Beneath our anxious quickenings, beneath our fanged fears, beneath the rusted armors of conviction, tenderness is what we long for — tenderness to salve our bruising contact with reality, to warm 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–May 29, 1958) — part love letter to his beloved donkey, part journal of ecstatic delight in nature and humanity, part fairy tale for the lonely.

Healer on a Donkey by Niko Pirosmani, early 1900s.

Living in his birthplace of Moguer — a small town in rural Andalusia — Jiménez began composing this uncommon posy of prose poems in 1907. Although it spans less than a year in his life with Platero, it took him a decade to publish it.

At its heart is a simple truth: 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 name over and over, like an incantation of love — is the tenderness of living with wonder and fragility. He celebrates Platero’s “big gleaming eyes, of a gentle firmness, in which the sun shines”; he reverences him as “friend to the old man and the child, to the stream and the butterfly, to the sun and the dog, to the flower and the moon, patient and pensive, melancholy and lovable, the Marcus Aurelius of the meadows.” He beckons him: “Come with me. I’ll teach you the flowers and the stars.”

And so he does:

Look, Platero, so many roses are falling everywhere: blue, pink, white, colorless roses… You’d think the sky was crumbling into roses… You’d think that from the seven galleries of Paradise roses were being thrown onto the earth… Platero, it seems, while the Angelus is ringing, that this life of ours is losing its everyday strength, and that a different strength from within, loftier, more constant, and purer, is causing everything, as if in fountain jets of grace… Your eyes, which you can’t see, Platero, and which you are mildly raising skyward, are two beautiful roses.

Together, poet and donkey traverse the Andalusian countryside in a state of rapturous harmony with each other and the living world:

Through the low-lying roads of summer, draped with tender honeysuckle, how sweetly we go! I read, 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 more than he walks. I let him.

[…]

Every so often Platero stops eating and looks at me. Every so often I stop reading and look at Platero.

There are echoes of Whitman in Jiménez’s exultations:

Before us are the fields, already green. Facing the immense, clear sky, of a blazing indigo, my eyes — so far from my ears! — open nobly, welcoming in its calm that indescribable placidity, that harmonious, divine serenity which dwells in the limitlessness of the horizon.

Art by Ryōji Arai from Every Color of Light

This longing for the infinite accompanies the young man and the old donkey as they cross the hills and valleys on their daily pilgrimages:

The evening extends beyond its normal limits, and the hour, infected with eternity, is infinite, peaceful, unfathomable.

Again and again, Platero’s presence magnifies the poet’s relishing of beauty, deepens his contact with the eternal:

I remain in ecstasy before the twilight. Platero, his black eyes scarlet with sunset, walks gently to a puddle of crimson, pink, and violet waters; he softly immerses his lips into the mirrors, which seem to liquefy as he touches them.

Punctuating these ecstasies are the inevitable spells of melancholy stemming from the fact that the price of being awake to life is being also awake to mortality. Aware that this enchanted life with his beloved Platero is only for the time being, Jiménez reaches into the sorrow of the future to consecrate it with joy:

Platero. I shall bury you at the foot of the large, round pine in the orchard at La Piña, which you like so much. You will remain alongside cheerful, serene life. The little boys will play and the little girls will sew beside you on their little low chairs. You will get to hear the verses that the solitude will inspire in me. You’ll hear the older girls singing when they wash clothes in the orange grove, and the sound of the waterwheel will be a joy and a solace to your eternal peace. And all year long the goldfinches, greenfinches, and vireos, in 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 read these pages thinking how everything we polish with attention becomes a mirror. So too the donkey becomes a mirror for the poet’s own soul:

Every so often Platero stops drinking and raises his head, like me, like the women in Millet’s paintings, to the stars, with a soft, infinite yearning.

Art by Ryōji Arai from Every Color of Light

Emanating from these vignettes is a reminder that the art of poetry, like the art of living, is a matter of the quality of attention we pay to things — a living 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 sun poses its silver-and-gold cheerfulness on the earth; butterflies of a hundred colors play everywhere, among the flowers, through the house (now inside, now out), on the fountain. All over, the countryside opens up into crackings and creakings, into a boiling of healthy new life.

It’s as if we were inside a huge honeycomb of light which was also the interior of an immense, flaming-hot rose.

One clear blue morning, the poet and the donkey come upon a gang of “treacherous boys” who have spread a net to catch birds from the nearby pinewood. Overcome by compassion for Platero’s “brethren of the sky,” Jiménez sets out to warn the birds in a scene that, once again, 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 sharp trot we ascended to the pinewood. When we arrived below the shady leafy cupola, I clapped my hands, sang, and shouted. Platero, catching the mood, brayed roughly a couple of times. And the deep, resonant echoes replied, as if from the depths of a large well. The birds flew away to another pinewood, singing.

Platero, amid the distant curses of the violent little boys, was brushing his big shaggy head against my heart, thanking me until he hurt my chest.

Art by Spanish artist Roc Riera Rojas from a rare edition of Don Quixote

Jiménez’s bright sympathy with living things extends beyond the world of animals. It is in these bonds of sympathy, of interbeing, that he finds the portal to the eternal:

Whenever I halt, Platero, I seem to be halting beneath the pine of La Corona… spreading green plentitude below the broad blue sky with white clouds… How strong I always feel when I rest beneath its memory! When I grew up, it was the only thing that didn’t cease to be big, the only thing that became bigger all the time. When they cut off that bough which the hurricane had broken, I thought a limb of my own had been pulled out; and at times, when some pain seizes on me unexpectedly, I imagine that it hurts the pine of La Corona.

[…]

The word “great” befits it as it does the sea, the sky, and my heart. In its shade many generations have rested, looking at the clouds, for centuries, as if on the water, beneath the sky, and in the nostalgia of my heart. When my thoughts wander freely and the arbitrary images settle whenever they wish, or in those moments when there are things that are seen as if by second sight, apart from that which is distinctly perceived, the pine of La Corona, transfigured into some picture of eternity, comes to my mind, more rustling and more gigantic yet, amid my doubts, beckoning me to repose in its peace, as if it were the true and eternal terminus of my journey through life.

Trees figure amply in Jiménez’s poetic imagination:

This tree, Platero, this acacia which I planted myself, a green flame that went on growing, spring after spring, and which now covers us with its abundant free-growing foliage, shot through with the setting sun, was the best support of my poetry as long as I lived in this house, now shut. Any one of its boughs, adorned with emerald in April or gold in October, cooled my brow if I just looked at it a moment, like the purest hand of a Muse.

Art by Art Young from Trees at Night, 1924. (Available as a print.)

Pulsating beneath all the vignettes is a deep sense of the poet’s unbroken solitude — even in the company of his donkey, even in his absolute presence with the living world. On a late-summer Sunday, reading Omar Khayyam under a pine tree “full of birds that don’t fly away” while the rest of town goes to church, he writes:

In the silence between two peals, the inner seething of the September morning acquires presence and resonance. The black-and-gold wasps fly around the grapevine laden with healthy bunches of muscat, and the butterflies, which are confusedly mingled with the flowers, seem to be renewed, in a metamorphosis of bright colors, as they flutter about. The solitude is like a great thought of light.

It is in this wakeful solitude amid nature that he finds what so longs for — beauty, serenity, eternity:

How beautiful the countryside is on these holidays when everyone abandons it! At most, in a young vineyard, in an orchard, some old man may be leaning against an unripe vine, above the pure stream… And one’s soul, Platero, feels like the true queen of what it possesses by virtue of its feelings, of the large healthy body of nature, which, when respected, gives the man who deserves it the submissive spectacle of its resplendent, eternal beauty.

Alongside Jiménez’s reverence of the eternal is his elegy for the passage of time, for the aching beauty of our mortal transience. When autumn comes, he writes:

Platero, the sun is already starting to feel too lazy to get out of its sheets, and the farmers are up earlier than he is… On the broad, moist path the yellow trees, sure that they’ll be green again, brightly light our rapid journey on both sides, like soft bonfires of clear gold.

[…]

These are the instants in which life is entirely contained in the departing gold…. Beauty makes eternal this fleeting moment without heartbeat, as if everlastingly dead while still alive.

Over and over, Jiménez syncopates between exultation and lament:

See how the setting sun, manifesting itself large and scarlet, as a visible god, draws to itself the ecstasy of all things and, in the strip of sea behind Huelva, sinks into the absolute silence that the world — that is, Moguer, its countryside, you, and I, Platero — pay to it in homage.

Over and over, he returns to the elemental truth of being, found in every flower and in every star — that to be alive just this moment, any moment, is enough, is eternity:

Platero, Platero! I’d give my whole life and I’d long for you to want to give yours, in exchange for the purity of this deep January night, lonely bright, and firm.

When Platero does eventually give his life, the poet meets his death with the same largehearted longing for the eternal that lives in everything ephemeral. Visiting Platero’s grave with the village children that had so loved him, he writes:

“Platero, my friend!” I said to the earth. “If, as I believe, you are now in a meadow in heaven, carrying adolescent angels on your shaggy back, can you perhaps have forgotten me? Platero, tell me: do you still remember me?”

And, as if in reply to my question, a weightless white butterfly, which I had never seen before, fluttered persistently, like a soul, from iris to iris.

The closing pages become part rhapsody and part requiem, concentrating and consecrating the tenderness that had scored the poet’s life with his donkey:

Sweet trotting Platero, my little donkey who carried my soul so often — only my soul! — over those low-lying roads of prickly pears, mallows, and honeysuckles; to you I dedicate this book which speaks of you, now that you can understand it.

Art by Ivan Bilibin, 1906. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Couple the soul-slaking Platero and I with the bittersweet story of Civilón — the real-life Spanish bull who inspired the beloved children’s book Ferdinand.

Albert Camus, a Nobel laureate himself and friend of many titanic natures, considered Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943) “the only great spirit” of the epoch.

Before she died a death of solidarity in an English sanatorium, refusing to take more food than her compatriots in Nazi-occupied France were rationed, before she enlisted to fight for freedom in the Spanish Civil War, the twenty-six-year-old Weil took a year’s leave of absence from her university teaching post to labor incognito in two car factories in order to better understand the plight of the working class. “Although I suffer from it all,” she wrote to one of her students, “I am more glad than I can say to be where I am… I have escaped from a world of abstractions.”

Despite the long wearying hours, despite the savage headaches that accompanied her throughout her short life, Weil never lapsed on her correspondence, writing long passionate letters to family, friends, colleagues, and students. Included in the posthumous volume Seventy Letters (public library) is her poignant response to her student asking for advice on how to govern her young heart.

Simone Weil

Weil begins with an admonition against mistaking sensory pleasure for actionable feeling:

There are people who have lived by and for nothing but sensations… What they really are is the dupes of life; and as they are confusedly aware of this they always fall into a profound melancholy which they can only assuage by lying miserably to themselves. For the reality of life is not sensation but activity — I mean activity both in thought and in action. People who live by sensations are parasites, both materially and morally, in relation to those who work and create… who do not seek sensations [but] experience in fact much livelier, profounder, less artificial and truer ones than those who seek them.

The gravest consequence of being enslaved by sensation, Weil observes, is that it reduces reality to your own sensory experience and hurls you into a kind of awful selfing that makes love impossible — for love, as Iris Murdoch so memorably put it, is “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” An epoch before Annie Dillard cautioned that “the life of sensation is the life of greed,” Weil writes:

The cultivation of sensations implies an egoism which revolts me. It clearly does not prevent love, but it leads one to consider the people one loves as mere occasions of joy or suffering and to forget completely that they exist in their own right. One lives among phantoms, dreaming instead of living.

She then turns to love itself:

I have no advice to give you but at least I have some warnings. Love is a serious thing, and it often means pledging one’s own life and also that of another human being, for ever. Indeed, it always means that, unless one of the two treats the other as a plaything; and in that case, which is a very common one, love is something odious. In the end, you see, the essential point in love is this: that one human being feels a vital need of another human being — a need which is or is not reciprocal and is or is not enduring, as the case may be.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward To

The price of this equivalence, Weil argues, is the difficulty of reconciling love and freedom — a difficulty Rilke addressed with lyrical poignancy, and one Octavio Paz captured in his lovely depiction of love as “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms.” Reflecting on the way love moors people to one another, Weil adds:

Love seems to me to involve an even more terrifying risk than that of blindly pledging one’s own existence; I mean the risk, if one is the object of a profound love, of becoming the arbiter of another human existence.

Half a century later, James Baldwin would echo the sentiment in his admonition that “loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.”

Complement with the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh on how to love and poet Donald Hall on the secret to lasting love, then revisit Weil on attention and grace, how to make use of your suffering, and how to be a complete human being.

“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” Rilke wrote while ailing with leukemia. To comprehend the luckiness of death is to comprehend life itself. When a loved one is dying and we get to be by their side, it is a double luckiness — lucky that we got to have the love at all, and lucky, which is not everyone’s luck, that we get to say goodbye. Even so, accompanying a loved one as they exit life is one of the most difficult and demanding experiences you could have.

How to move through it is what my talented friend and sometime-collaborator Wendy MacNaughton explores in How to Say Goodbye (public library) — a tender illustrated field guide to being present with and for what Alice James called “the most supremely interesting moment in life,” drawing on Wendy’s time as artist-in-residence at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco and her own profound experience at her beloved aunt’s deathbed.

Punctuating Wendy’s signature ink-and-watercolor illustrations of Zen Hospice residents and her soulful pencil sketches of her aunt are spare words relaying the wisdom of hospice caregivers: what to say, how to listen, how to show up, how to stay present with both the experience of the dying and your own.

The book’s beating heart is an invitation to grow comfortable with change, with uncertainty, with vulnerability, radiating a living affirmation of the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s insistence that “when you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence.”

If you don’t know what to say, start by saying that.

That’s very vulnerable.

So much falling away. The body falling apart.

There’s a lot going on in that conversation.

It’s current.

Right here.

Right now.

Neither of you knows what to do in this situation.

That opens things up.

In lovely symmetry to Zen Hospice Project founder Frank Ostaseski’s five invitations for the end of life, Wendy draws on what she learned from caregivers and distills the five most powerful things we can say to the loved one dying — “a framework for a conversation of love, respect, and closure,” rendered in words of great depth and great simplicity, like the language of children, for it is this realm of unselfconscious candor we return to at the end:

I forgive you.

Please forgive me.

Thank you.

I love you.

Goodbye.

Emanating from these tender pages is a reminder that death merely magnifies the fundamental fact of living: We are fragile motes of matter in the impartial hand of chance, beholden to entropy, haunted by loss, saved only by love.

Complement How to Say Goodbye with Rebecca Elson’s “Antidotes to Fear of Death” and Anna Belle Kaufman’s stunning poem about how to live and how to die, then revisit Mary Gaitskill on how to move through life when your parents are dying — some of the simplest, most difficult and redemptive life-advice ever offered.