Full Quote

“So, the coin was tossed, turned somersaults; sometimes coming up heads, sometimes tails. Man, the measure of all things, speaks through my mouth and recounts in my own words what my eyes saw. Out of ten possible heads, I may have only seen one tail, or vice versa: there are no excuses; my mouth says what my eyes told it. Was our view too narrow, too biased, too hasty, were our conclusions too rigid? Maybe so, but this is how the typewriter interprets the disparate impulses which made you press the keys, and those fleeting impulses are dead. Besides, no one is answerable to them. The person who wrote these notes died the day he stepped back on Argentine soil. The person who is reorganizing and polishing them, me, is no longer me, at least I’m not the me I was. Wandering around our ‘America with a capital A’ has changed me more than I thought.

Any book on photographic technique can show you the image of a nocturnal landscape with the full moon shining and the accompanying text reveal the secret of this sunlit darkness. But the reader doesn’t really know what kind of sensitive fluid covers my retina, I’m hardly award of it myself, so you can’t examine the plate to find out the actual moment it was taken. If I present a nocturnal picture, you have to take it or leave it, it’s not important. Unless you actually know the landscape my diary photographed, you’ve no option but to accept my version. I now leave you with myself, the man I once was…”
~Ernesto Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries - Introduction