Your truth? No, the Truth; and come with me to…

It is proverb LXXXV of the series “Proverbs and Songs” in New Songs. The neighbouring poems are just as brief: the one before confesses “among the figs I am soft; among the rocks, of stone. Bad!”, and in the one after the poet says he has his friends in solitude, because “when I am with them, how far away they are!” A little earlier, one of the proverbs bears the date of Baeza, 1919, and shows the “little man who smokes and thinks” before the fall of the crowns of Wilhelm and Nicholas.

Machado published New Songs in 1924, when he was living in Segovia and teaching French at the secondary school there. He dedicated this series of proverbs to José Ortega y Gasset, and his interest in philosophy shows in them: many deal with the self and the other.

The proverb has become one of his most quoted sayings. It distinguishes between each person’s truth, which is only an opinion, and the Truth with a capital letter, which no one possesses and which can only be sought in company.

New Songs, “Proverbs and Songs”, LXXXV, 1924

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