Sorrow, it is not true that I know you,

you are the nostalgia for a good life,

and the aloneness of the soul in shadow,

the sailing ship without wreck and without guide.

 

Like an abandoned dog who cannot find

a smell or a track and roams

along roads, with no road, like

the child who ina night of the fair

 

gets lost among the crowd,

and the air is dusty and the candles

fluttering – astounded, his heart

weighed down by music and by pain;

 

that’s how I am, drunk, sad by nature,

a mad and lunar guitarist, a poet,

an ordinary man lost in dreams,

searching constantly for God among the mists.

Antonio Machado

 

I don’t think I’ve ever read a better description of the sad loneliness that often accompanies the search for God. I was particularly caught by the phrase “nostalgia for a good life.” As we mature and have some experience of life behind us, there seems to always be a slight regretful looking back over the shoulder at what had been and now was not to be – the other road seeming to offer a better life than the one we have.

The rudderless ship, an abandoned dog and a lost child wandering at the fair all present a picture of loss and sorrow. The dusty air and fluttering candles bring the surreal world of a fair to life and you can almost hear the music of the carousel in the background.

The image of music continues when the poet calls himself a mad and lunar guitarist, conjuring the picture of a man playing beneath the moon, serenading not the lover but the Beloved, who like the moon seems ever out of reach, lost in the mists of a dreamlike world.

Antonio Macho, was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of ’98. His work had a style characterized by both an engagement with humanity on one side and an almost Taoist contemplation of existence on the other, a synthesis that according to Machado echoed the most ancient popular wisdom. In Gerardo Diego’s words, Machado “spoke in verse and lived in poetry.”  (Wikipedia)