“We are victims, I thought, of a double hallucination. If we look outward, and concentrate on entering things, our external world begins to lose solidity, and if we conclude that it exists not in and for itself, but exists because of us, it ends by dissolving. However, if, moved by our private reality, we turn our eyes inward, then the world pushes in on us, and it is our interior world, our being, that disappears. What to do then? Weave the thread given to us, dream our dream and live; it is the only way we can achieve the miracle of growth. A man attentive to himself and trying to overhear himself drowns the only voice he could hear – his own; but other voices confuse him. Are we then doomed to be merely observers? But when we see, reason is present, and reason analyses and dissolves. The reason will soon bring the whole theatre down, and, finally, our shadow alone will be projected against the background. As for the poet, I thought that his job was to create new poems out of what is eternally human, spirited stories that have their own life, even though they came from him."

Antonio Machado, Madrid, 1917