Post #95: Don Quixote

17 Feb. 2024

     The outlines of the story are familiar to many who would never dream of plowing through a notoriously long-winded labyrinth of a read:* our “knight of the sorrowful countenance” dresses up in cardboard “armor” to do battle with the arms of windmills (giants), to make chivalrous gestures towards rough village hussies who laugh at him (chaste maidens), to pay court to a sturdy peasant lass (a high-born lady beyond all earthly compare), and to free prisoners in a chain-gang (victims of oppression) who promptly turn on him, rob him, beat him, and leave him for dead. And so forth.

     It is most obviously a cruel satire, but it might also be read as a more serious warning about the dangers of overly romanticized thinking that willfully disregards the unwelcome ways of the world**—politics and dating come most immediately to mind, but the possibilities are endless, while the deleterious results have been reported to range from the bitterly frustrating, via the utterly deplorable, to the outright calamitous.

     But there is a third degree at issue, which should become obvious to anyone who gets to the end of the story, but which is correspondingly easy to miss because not many readers of Cervantes ever do persist so far. In the very last chapter (of 131, if I’m adding them up correctly), Don Quixote confesses to the world that he was living a mere fantasy, and he resolutely foreswears such delusions for all time. Not only will he seek out no more adventures, he repudiates them once and forevermore as mere folly and waywardness on his part.

     What comes next? He sickens and dies. His last and truest friend, Sancho Panza, his erstwhile “squire,” tries to remonstrate with him, in tears: “The craziest thing a man can do is to let himself die just like that, without anyone killing him, nor any hand finishing him off except that of melancholy!” But Quixote will not hear of it: “I was crazy, and now I’m sane; I was Don Quixote de la Mancha, and now I’m Alonso Quixano.” And so he makes his exit, near fifty—a toothless age, then, at which Casanova too gave up all hope of Lady Fortuna’s favors (#29), but nowhere near senescence at any human epoch. (Low average life expectancy at birth does not mean that human beings were ever particularly likely to die during what we would call middle age, thirty to fifty. In pre-industrial societies only about half lived past adolescence, and far fewer than we are used to made it into their seventies, eighties, or nineties, but some always did, at all times and places.)

     There is in this deathbed confession something we should ponder before we make ready to crush the fancies of others, to root out their superstitions, to shatter their childish-looking beliefs, or indeed before we take the hard-nosed realist’s wrecking ball to our own dreams and rose-tinted scenarios—our boyish dreams of glory, the young man’s great expectations, a wearying adult’s chastened and tarnished but lingering hopes of something better, the green lights at the other side of the bay. (Gatsby too had to die once he lost Daisy; for it was she who had provided his only stars to steer by.***) Ask yourself always what better things you have to put in place of what you are about to discredit and discard as outdated and worthless; only then take it away, with great trepidation, lest you be proved wrong. You would not be the first.

     The would-be knight of La Mancha offers no very shining model to live by, no great example to follow, heaven forbid; I’m not suggesting otherwise, despite certain affinities (writing hundreds of thousands of words that hardly anyone reads being a quixotic quest perhaps second to none). My point is not to plead Quixote’s case, or my own, but only to urge caution: be gentle, or at least careful, with your seemingly naive hopes and dreams, even if they may look dated and increasingly foolish with the years. If you leave them out with the garbage, you cannot easily get them back. Nor are you likely to acquire new ones in your sobered and supposedly sanitized state. You may be able to reconcile yourself, as Don Quixote did, and make your peace with higher powers; but then you may also find yourself, as he did, with nothing much to live for anymore in this world.

     There is something worse than to write all those largely unnoticed lines, in other words, and that is to lose faith in the very point of doing so, letting the pen drop from your hand (or any other instrument of your craft or calling or passion in life), and throwing it all into the fire—at least if you do not have anything better, anything more hopeful, anything more redeeming to replace it with.

*I recommend the Signet Classics edition, translated by Tom Lathrop (2011). It reads well, which is indispensable if you hope to stay the distance (a thousand dense pages), and it is cheap in case you abandon the mission along the way, as most others have before you.

**”My only purpose,” run the final lines, “was to make men loathe the fictitious and foolish histories of the books of chivalry.” Whether this too was meant to be taken humorously, or with a more serious subtext, is open to interpretation.

***I am not endorsing Gatsby’s obsession with a spoiled, shallow society girl whose main attraction was precisely how far she was out of his league; nor am I embracing Gatsby himself, though I quite agree that he was “worth the whole damn bunch” of rotten opportunists who used and abused his generosity and discarded him without a second thought when he was no longer profitable to them. Yet it should be borne in mind that Gatsby was a callous rake before he met Daisy; that he took to machine guns far too enthusiastically; that his “pharmacies” ran on booze and other illicit substances, to say nothing of all manner of additional rackets darkly hinted at; and that there are even more sinister shadows around the death of Gatsby’s original mentor, the yachtsman Dan Cody. It’s not spelled out, only insinuated (a single picture of Cody on his wall, described as “a token of forgotten violence”), but I get the impression that Gatsby had a hand in murder most foul, for a legacy of $25,000, out of which he was subsequently cheated by his presumed accomplice, Ella Kaye.