…but he learned to live
with those and all the miseries of glory as he discovered in the course of his
uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than
love, more lasting than truth, he had arrived without surprise at the ignominious
fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of
being obeyed without authority when he became convinced in the trail of yellow
leaves of his autumn that he had never been master of all his power, that he
was condemned not to know life except in reverse, condemned to decipher the
seams and straighten the threads of the woof and the warp of the tapestry of
illusions of reality without suspecting even too late that the only livable
life was one of show, the one we saw from this side which wasn’t his general
sir, this poor people’s side with the trail of yellow leaves of our uncountable
years of misfortune and our ungraspable instants of happiness…
~Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975
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