Brian Keenan

“Consolation is about sharing loneliness and making it bearable.”

“I have that feeling, which I have had often in Chile, that while human beings can make efforts to control, tame and use this place, clearing forests, marking boundaries, their influence here is only transitory.”

“Once again Chile reduces us to what R. L. Stevenson called 'the virginity of senses' where words cannot match the impressions received.”

“A statue of Arturo Prat, hero of the Chilean Navy, surveyed it all. From under his statue I look up onto those fragrant wooded hills. The shanty houses blur into a pastiche of colour, yellows and reds, cobalt and purple. The washing lines strung across the stairways and hung from balconies echo the ships' flags fluttering in the harbour.This is a city of the muses. For poets, painters and composers. This is the artists' enclave. This is Venice and Florence waiting to be explored, and I dream it still.”

“The accepted view appears to be that Neruda represent the real Chile: a place of poetry, freedom of spirit and international enterprise.”

“I loved the exuberance of the place. A sense of liberation and love of life penetrated every room. His home was like his poetry, full of hints of fantasy, allegory and hedonism. Neruda's presence was everywhere writ large on the house. He had build it, seemingly haphazardly without any architect's plans or permission from authority. In a sense, the house had the same structure as a poem on first reading - awkward and confused. Yet wandering through it was like wandering through his poems. Suddenly everything fell in to place. A romantic avant-garde poet could not have lived anywhere else.”