Daily Inspiration Quote by Augusto Roa Bastos

Autobiography, Roa Bastos suggests, is a trap dressed up as confession. The moment you try to narrate your own life, you get swallowed by the present-tense machinery of self-justification: you edit, you posture, you turn lived experience into a defensible story. “Loses himself in the immediate” isn’t about mindfulness; it’s about the tyranny of the now, the way memory collapses into whatever your current needs require. The “I” becomes a hostage to its latest revision.

So the pivot - “One can only speak of another” - lands like both a limitation and a method. It’s not modesty; it’s a strategy for telling the truth sideways. By speaking through someone else, you gain the distance that self-narration destroys. Fiction, testimony, even biography become more honest than autobiography because they admit mediation. The self can’t look at itself directly without turning into propaganda.

That idea carries particular weight coming from a Paraguayan novelist shaped by dictatorship, exile, and the long shadow of state-authored reality. In societies where official narratives erase people, “relating his life” is never innocent; it risks becoming either a confession for the regime or a performance for survival. Roa Bastos’ work (most famously I, the Supreme) understands power as something that speaks in the first person to monopolize truth. Against that, he proposes a counter-literature: fractured voices, masks, “another” as a refuge. The subtext is bracing: the self is real, but it’s reachable only through detours.