“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” ― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Don Quixote is a favourite book of mine. I'm far from being alone in that choice, of course. So I'll give a few reasons why I love the book so much. The most obvious reason is an affinity with the infinity of beautiful madness:
“For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
“Don Quixote” by Cervantes is “the most splendid and sad of all books,” said Dostoyevsky; it is “the saddest of all books” because it is the story of a disillusionment.
“He will point to the fact that humanity’s most sublime beauty, its most sublime purity, chastity, forthrightness, gentleness, courage, and, finally, its most sublime intellect – all these often (alas, all too often) come to naught, pass without benefit to humanity, and even become an object of humanity’s derision simply because all these most noble and precious gifts with which a person is often endowed lack but the very last gift – that of genius to put all this power to work and to direct it along a path of action that is truthful, not fantastic and insane, so as to work for the benefit of humanity!”
Don Quixote proves that a crude fantasy, lovingly embraced, resolves doubt. “It’s possible to believe in the first and most important dream with no more doubts, solely thanks to the second, even more absurd fantasy.”
Didn’t you invent a new dream, a new lie, even a terribly crude one, perhaps, but one that you were quick to embrace lovingly only because it resolved your initial doubt?
“Summon that old fool who thinks there is justice in the world.”
The dukes show Don Quixote the reality of all that he has dreamed about. The dukes offer him his dreams in reality, not as the ideals he espoused but as their antithesis. The dukes rob Don Quixote of his ability to live by his own imagination. They’ll do it to all of us if you let them.
The tremendous power the dukes have is to destroy hope and the imagination. They establish reality once more, only in its ugliest form; it is a reality of meanness, hypocrisy, the cult of appearances, the degradation of others, a hatred for those who are not like you, ridicule for those who are different. That reality is full of fears and phobias, which the dukes personify.
Which way should we read Don Quixote?
Don Quixote pursues fantasy to live by, he challenges reality, and reality wins; illusions shattered and hopes lost, he starts to die, and the people who tried to ween him from the fantasies he read in books now try to ween him away from the disheartening, soulless, deadening reality in which only the dead could live in, and the alive could only die in.
“truth may be stretched thin and not break, and it always floats on the surface of the lie, like oil on water.” ― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Throughout the centuries, Don Quixote continues with his craft of being a knight errant. That’s how I read the tale. Don Quixote is a permanent lesson as to what humanity can do to go beyond itself in order to reach new goals, we as men, women, and children have to constantly reimagine and remake the world and not be conformed by what the 'normal' world offers. So no wonder I like him. He seems to have fallen more times than even I have. But he got up each time to renew the quest. One thing that is affecting us is the lack of Quixotism in the world, not going out in the fields to battle windmills and armies of sheep. This is what Don Quixote is telling us: let us doubt a happiness that is so prefabricated, let us be a little bit more … Quixotic.
But here’s a contrary view that is worth considering:
‘The biggest danger of Quixotism, to my mind, is that people will be turned off the entire progressive project. All the antagonistic jargon and lists and simple black-and-white morality and name-calling and moral self-righteousness reads as madness to people who might otherwise be sympathetic or potentially persuadable to progressive causes. If progressives want to make headway, frankly, they need to get down off their high horses. The truest and most productive path for all of us is that offered by Sancho Panza, whose role is to state simple truths, none more important than that “those you see yonder are no giants, but wind-mills.”’
I thought we needed both, the idealistic dreamer and Henry Dubb, the man who faces the world with common moral reason. (And the criticism misses the disillusionment, but hey "whatever happened to Sancho Panza?") And Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante ain’t so high really, just a bag of bones as described by Cervantes. His ideas, though …
“Fantasy filled his mind from everything that he read in the books - enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, flirtations, love affairs, misfortunes and impossible nonsense. As a result, he came to believe that all those fictitious adventures he was reading about were true, and for him there was no history more authentic in the world.”
― Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Lesson: obsessive reading of chivalric romances drives you mad. A kindred soul, then. I just call it ‘rational freedom’ and have pursued it on my own high horse. I am open to happiness, though. As in Aristotelian flourishing.
Four hundred years on, the mad old knight from La Mancha still reminds us to question things as they are, and to dream of the world as we would like it to be.
It’s a noble vision. I'll not be weened from it.
Why Don Quixote?
His “madness” was not the straight and narrow.
'Don Quixote is not about impossible dreams. It is about rationality. Don Quixote wasn’t driven by an “inner voice”, nourished by himself, seeking security that doesn’t exist. However considered, the Man of the Mancha had a vision. He studied and lived it.
'There has to be vision, direction and leadership. It cannot be otherwise because of the role of expectations, generated by social practises. In a dehumanizing world, they must be transformed.
“It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight's sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.”
― Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“Where there's music there can be no evil”
― Cervantes, Don Quixote
“You should know, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that love shows no restraint, and does not keep within the bounds of reason as it proceeds, and has the same character as death: it attacks the noble palaces of kings as well as the poor huts of shepherds, and when it takes full possession of a heart, the first thing it does is to take away fear and shame…”
― Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“What is more dangerous than to become a poet? Which is, as some say, an incurable and infectious disease.”
― Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“...although this is poetic fiction, it contains hidden moral truths worthy of being heeded and understood and imitated,...”
― Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“Don Quixote is so crazy that he is sure no author could have invented him”
― Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“The pretense, the fiction (for it is scarcely more than that) of an attack on the books of chivalry is kept up throughout; but as the story develops and deepens beyond the author's expectations as well as those of the reader, Don Quixote becomes nothing less than a novelistic treatment of the essential nature of human life and man's greatest metaphysical problem: that of illusion and reality. It is a problem as old as Plato-and a good deal older- and as new as Jean-Paul Sartre. It is one that, as Lionel Trilling has rightly observed, has always been the serious novelist's chief concern. In this light, there can no longer be any question as to Don Quixote's "madness" in the ordinary acceptation of that term. In Waldo Frank's finely expressive phrase, he is "a man possessed, not a madman.”
― Samuel Putnam, Don Quixote
I read that Terry Gilliam's 'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' will finally come to UK cinemas in 2020.
‘Terry Gilliam spent 30 years chasing his passion project and finally completed “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” last year. The seriocomic saga folded in on itself, as Gilliam seemed to be trapped in his own Quixotic delusion that his ambitious Spanish production would ever be completed.’
We just need John Neville to make a return to make everything well. He may be dead, but that should be a minor hindrance for Baron Munchausen.
“I have never died all my life”
― Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“Take my advice and live for a long, long time. Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
“Now, tell me which is the greater deed, raising a dead man or killing a giant?” “The answer is self-evident,” responded Don Quixote. “It is greater to raise a dead man.” ― Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“... he who's down one day can be up the next, unless he really wants to stay in bed, that is...” ― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
The immense Jacques Brel sings “La Quête” from “L'Homme de la Mancha,” available on the immense DVD box “Comme Quand on Etait Beau.”
Broadcast Christmas Eve 1968
Some kind soul translates, although I am sure other translations are available:
“To dream an impossible dream To bear the burden of enterprise To burn, though it may be fever, To go where no one will go To love until torn asunder To love too much, even wrongly To attempt, without an army, without armor, To reach for the unreachable star, That is my quest, To follow my star I don't care about my chances I don't care about time, or how wretched I am and I'll struggle forever without sleep, without complaint, To be condemned For the gold of one utterance of love. I don't know if I will be this hero but my heart holds fast and the towns have been shrouded in blue because of one poor soul Burn on, till all's been burnt Burn on, burn too much, even wrongly To reach out till I'm torn apart, To reach for the unreachable star.”
As I said at the start, I feel a kindred spirit and soul mate:
“It's wrong to take even those occasional long sentences in the Quixote with loose structures, and subdivide, tighten and correct them because they are not instances of stylistic carelessness but examples of Cervantes's masterly creation of realistic dialogue: His amused observation of the deleterious effects of natural verbosity, or of passionate interest in the subject under discussion, on the speaker's grammar.”
― John Rutherford, Don Quixote
It's simple!
“All you have to do is try, with meaningful words, properly and effectively arranged, to honestly unroll your sentences and paragraphs, clearly, sensibly, just explaining what you're up to as well and as powerfully as you can. Let your ideas be understood without making them complicated or obscure. And see, too, if your pages can make sad men laugh as they read, and make smiling men even happier; try to keep simple men untroubled, and wise men impressed by your imagination, and sober men not contemptuous, nor careful men reluctant, to praise it.” ― Miguel de Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quixote
And for those who are still with me, notwithstanding the deleterious effects of natural verbosity, to say nothing of passionate interest, a little salute (those few who have watched until the very end of the end credits in "Les Visiteurs" will know what I'm saying). The drawing is Don Quixote by Pablo Picasso from 1955.