Don Quixote
16 June 2007

by Miguel Cervantes

(the most valiant knight errant in all of Spain)

What, you may find yourself asking, could possibly be written about the great novel, Don Quixote, that has not already been laid down in one discourse or another? What has not been tackled in succeeding texts or stretched out in excessive lectures? What has not been placed under a microscope to be examined and re-examined for the sake of mass understanding by those who propound higher-learning? I don’t know. I shrug my shoulders in happy ignorance. There is no good knowing what others think, unless, you first know for yourself. I write these reading notes to know what I think about the books I read and in doing so, I derive great pleasure.

Before I even begin, I must comment on the translator. A well translated book is worth one hundred that are not, allowing one to slide into the author’s meaning as if both the reader’s mind and the words are covered in ghee. Effortless and unaware that a translation is even being read. Taking into consideration the age of this book (four hundred years is no walk in the park,) I knew that there had to be a translation to equal Cervantes’ original. Searching the bountiful information of the internet I found that there were in fact two translators that had nearly perfected this great task. I ultimately chose Edith Grossman for the excessive praise she has received and (I can’t help it) the striking red cover. My expectations were fulfilled, the words were Cervantes’ own.

There is magic and sacrosanctity surrounding a book that has withstood the erosion of time. Four hundred years, my god! It is like the castle, Orisini-Odescalchi, that looms outside my door. Though ancient, its age is perhaps at one thousand years, it still endures with equable foreboding. Mightily it hovers on the hill overlooking this old town, guarding despite its obsoletism, persevering, if only for aesthetics. Four hundred years have passed and the era of chivalry is as expired as it was in Don Quixote’s time. Now we have different books of chivalry, a different popular phase for different masses. Perhaps reality T.V. shows would be an adequate comparison, perhaps you can imagine Rocinante trotting through the suburbs of L.A.? Four hundred years, that’s a hell of a long time.

To narrow down a one thousand page novel into a few pages is no simple task, so that is something I am not going to do. It would be as masochistic as asking the question, what did Don Quixote set out to do when he picked up his sword and his shield and set out on his first sally to become the heralded knight errant he has become? The answer is as evasive as the Knight of the Sorrowful Face himself. Circling back around to stare in the mirror one can only behold oneself, but no, not Don Quixote. What he saw in the mirror was a grandiose and chivalric scene, where he stood, the most valiant and the most brave, with a helmet on his head instead of a pot, a strong steed below him instead of the scraggly Rocinante, a castle instead of an inn, giants instead of windmills, maidens instead of whores, princesses instead of maidens and on and on. What Don Quixote saw in the mirror amazes me, as it should.

“I only devote myself to making the world understand its error in not restoring that happiest of times when the order of knight errantry was in flower,” so says Don Quixote. Is this a man overwrought by madness? Don Quixote had a vision and he pursued it with every ounce of willpower he had been alloted. It could be said that the fantasy overtook him, but I believe that through his fantasy, he overtook reality. What is reality anyway? A bunch of particles cohered together and christened as something, a word, or something else, a phrase. It can be said that we create our own reality, though we usually tend to stick between the black lines that we have been given and that have been handed down from forefather to forefather, adjusted and rearranged through time by society and its environs. The books have been written long ago. I’m not saying that there is no individual autonomy, we are not exactly tied, but in some ways we are. For example, you see a big round object being thrown from child to child in a park and you say to yourself, “That is a ball,” without any contention. Don Quixote might say, “Stop children! For you are torturing an abject soul! Release him at once!” Don Quixote has managed to usurp his reality by fitting it all into the terms of chivalric novels, he has tinted his mirror with a different hue, what is not possible?

To go mad is to escape from the reason that most people adhere to without question, it is calling a ball anything but a ball, it is slipping to the other side of the black line and it is over that line where anything is possible. Through maddened flights there are moments of great lucidity for then one is able to see, with an altered perspective, into oneself or the world surrounding. Don Quixote was said to be a sane madman when he talked of anything but matters of knights and chivalry. He spoke with great intelligence so that those who had seen him, mere moments before, slashing wineskins he believed to be giants, were stunned. He spoke with composure and surety, so that no one could doubt his sanity for even a moment. In this way the book fluctuates, a buoy on the ocean of rationality, bobbing along on the fluxing currents.

What would a proper madness be without enchantments? These enchantments are one of my favorite facets in this novel. What Don Quixote calls enchantments, which to my supposition are devices used in novels of chivalry, seem to me comparable to a hallucinatory state. These enchantments, sometimes cast by wizards such as Merlin or invoked by Don Quixote himself, allow him to see what he wants to see, to explain events that occur outside the laws of chivalry or to explain the generally inexplicable. The hallucinatory state I am comparing enchantments to is not that of the severely mentally ill, but of the variety induced by certain herbs and plants of this earth. For one to actually “see” something when smoking a joint is not very likely, one needs stronger and more potent plants for that task, but there is enhancement, dare I say enchantment? There is no need for explanations for everything is just fine. The same for Don Quixote, when he finds himself in questionable situations he finds no need for analyzation, he simply responds with, “It appears as though I am enchanted,” and all ensuing frets fall to the ground.

The weightiest enchantment in all the adventures of Don Quixote is that of the peerless Dulcinea of Toboso. Who can deny her beauty? Long golden tresses which fall effortlessly down her back, an aquiline nose and eyes of – but wait! Halt in your tracks! She has been mysteriously transformed into an ugly peasant girl astride a lowly mare. What is a great knight to do when the magnitude of his vows fall short? This enchantment is more complicated then all that, for sneaky Sancho Panza instigated what he initially believed would turn to his benefit. In knowing Don Quixote and his propensity to see what he wants to see, Sancho declared the peasant to be the wondrous Dulcinea, claiming she was visible in all her pure and modest splendor. Don Quixote disagrees, the woman riding towards them is as ugly and as base as the dirt we walk on. How could she possibly be the lady, Dulcinea of Toboso? Unless, of course, her fair figure has been enchanted to reveal an ugly peasant when beheld in Don Quixote’s eyes. Of course!

Oh! how easy and light-hearted the world would be if everyone took those big questions, those analyzed and reanalyzed doubts in ones head and simply declared them as a matter of enchantment. George Bush II keeps on with the deplorable and dreadful war, of course, he must be enchanted (or else. . .) Today my cat was ran over and I dropped my wallet into the sewer, I must be having an enchanted day. Feel the stress shedding away. Us humans are so prone to self-pity, to feeling sorry for ourselves at the onset of a bad situation, to desiring an alteration of that which has already passed. Don Quixote knows. He knows all things are impermanent and are better off enchanted. He never doubts the truth of what he says, he never fears and charges, as fast as the craggily Rocinante can, into battle. As long as he believes himself to be Don Quixote of La Mancha, the most valiant of all errant knights that will go and have gone before, he will recover from whatever ill that befalls him. His is a madness of divine origin. It is exactly this madness which creates novels of this caliber, statues and fountains that gurgle with prolonged beauty one hundred years after one hundred years, art that leaves us in awe, immortality. It is such madness which dares to push mortality into the strictly human, to take up an enchanted life, to go wherever the feet may lead. Upward and outward! May madness devour us all!

I can not completely compose this piece without mention of Sancho Panza. He is a grounding force. He is so completely human. From his desire to govern an ínsula to his adoration of sleep, food and wine, he is the indulgent part of us all. It is true, that by the completion of the novel the two men, through the course of their many adventures and conversations, begin to resemble each other in their thoughts and verbiage. Tho, behold Sancho Panza! He does not put forward his fragile life for anything, he does not consent to nights without sleep or adventures without stopping for a bit of cheese and bread, sloshed down with some rueful wine. He takes his comfort when it is offered, his governorship when it is given. He is at the mercy of his body and its earthly desires. His mind does not fire quick lightning bolts like that of his master. In short, they are perfect companions, as their lengthy conversations prove. What else is one to do when set out for a sally?

The body of Don Quixote, contrastingly enough, is against any possibility of pain, as the laws governing all knights errant require the sacrifice of the body and irremeable suffering. Hence, he is able to challenge a lion to battle, to charge lance first into a group of mounted and armed men and to boast of his abilities as if he could conquer without question. Don Quixote has no defensive skills, his figure is more comical then threatening, but his body remains oddly potent. He takes a royal beating and rises without complaint, while Sancho lies on the ground, moaning and groaning in pain. It is as if at times, Don Quixote does not have body at all and is only a mind focused on his duties as a knight errant, a mind, whose immalleability prevents him from ever giving-up and ever entertaining doubt. The madness is in the determination. I would have to bend at some point, especially when those Don Quixote meets on the king’s highway, bluntly laugh in his face, spitting on knight errantry as if it was the dust of the earth. No, I would not persevere. Eventually I would become more of a Sancho Panza, sleeping until noon so as to forget about all the rabble of disbelievers.

In the end, Don Quixote can’t last either. Once the mirror again reflects a face whose features are much too familiar, there are but two choices that can be made. One: accept that that which you thought yourself to be is dead or two: fight to the bitter end, until the ground is covered with mangled corpses, all remnants of past lives and all pieces of the self. Though, when this fight is over and there are no more reflections to be fought, one is still only left with oneself, staring wide-eyed back from the mirror. Don Quixote was forced to look in the mirror and what he saw was an old man reaching the winter of his life. He saw the bags under his eyes and the wrinkles spreading from every delta across his skin. He saw himself, Alonso Quixano the Good, not a valiant knight errant, but a man of human proportions. This man, whose strength and will had bore the valiant knight could not exist without him. He could not fight nor could he accept, so what else could this woe-begotten man do but to succumb to sanity and die. Is that what sanity is? Some kind of bland homeostasis not even worth proceeding with? Alonso the Good’s single action has only one message. Without his madness he is only a man and what good is a man without wild dreams or elaborate fantasies?

Despite my literary background I had no idea what this book was going to be. The authors who have been inspired and taught by this great work number far more then those I know. It is not only the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that leaves us in awe, though some find the story silly and redundant in traversing to its point. Imbedded in the text are rare gems Cervantes implanted for our delight. His method of story-telling, his playfulness and apt histories have much to teach to those who wish to write, if only one listens attentively enough. He has been compared to Shakespeare, but unlike this English gentleman, Cervantes methods are still valid today. While Shakespeare drowns in his own language, Cervantes rises with a light-heart. But was it him? Was Cervantes the Knight of the Sorrowful Face? This inquiry must rest where it stands.

To read Don Quixote was for me an adventure in its original sense of the word. I chose this book to accompany me on several flights and to several places. Began in Oakland, California, it now rests in Bracciano, Italy. Despite several moves and changes of situation, every time I picked up this book the proceeding chapters read did not need to be skimmed and refreshed. This book has a rare continuity, an ease and delight in being what it is.

Here Don Quixote rests. I am hesitant to end this piece for then my reading shall truly be over. Though I am reassured that it will not be the last time I close its pages. When I place the book on the shelf, that glaring red cover will face me with its desire to be read again and again. I will pick it up, my eyes will fall on the first sentence, “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived. . .” So sweetly he sings.

Bracciano, Italy
June 2007

Also: Check out the ongoing discussion of this ongoing novel at Tilting at Windmills.