“Truth is the mother of history, which is the rival of time, the depository of deeds.”Miguel de Cervantes · Don Quijote · 1615 · Partea II, capitolul 3
What goes unrecorded disappears entirely: history, born of truth, is the only force that saves facts from being devoured by time.
Cervantes thinks of history as a struggle for preservation. Time erases deeds, oblivion devours them, and history — written from truth — is the only force that can save them, hence its title as time's rival. The mechanism is transmission: an unrecorded deed vanishes completely. An example: battles no one wrote about survive today only as nameless graves, while the chronicled ones go on living.
Why it matters It reminds us that archives, testimonies and confessions are acts of resistance — what goes unrecorded is lost.