164. Don Quixote

Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Translated by Edith Grossman. 1605. 940 pages. [Source: Bought]

First sentence: Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

Premise/plot: Don Quixote has an impossible dream. [That would be a short and sweet summary, though not particularly accurate.] In a world of his own making, Don Quixote IS a knight; a real-life, honest-to-goodness knight like those in his favorite books. Every day offers an opportunity for thrilling quests. The world may think him mad, foolish, insane, delusional, out of his wits. But to Don Quixote, he thinks the world is under an enchantment. They cannot see the truth. They are the fools for being blind to 'the truth' not he. 

Sancho Panza is Don Quixote's squire. Is he more or less foolish than his master? His dream is different than Quixote's dream. He isn't brave, dashing, daring, adventurous. In some ways, he's the exact opposite of Quixote in every way. But Quixote has promised that he'll give Sancho an insula to govern if he goes with him as a squire. And, I suppose, this hope of future power is his dream. Maybe. Mostly, I think Sancho Panzo dreams of a comfortable life--food to eat, soft bed to rest, and NO brutal beatings. 

These two are out on the road [except for when they are not]. Ever-restless [except for when they are not.] 

 My thoughts: The book is in two volumes. The first was published in 1605. The second was published in 1615. There are highs and lows in each volume. When it is good, it is very good. When it is dull, it is very dull, incredibly dull. 

There are dozens--if not hundreds--of asides. The narrative branches out into little side stories. These stories have very little if anything to do with the main narrative. Don Quixote keeps running into people who like to tell random stories. Sometimes not even their own stories. The main narrative is a platform of sorts for other stories the author wanted to tell/publish. 

At times this is a story easy to love. At other times, it's really not.

Quotes:

In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind.

The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame.

“Oh, Señor!” said the niece. “Your grace should send them to be burned, just like all the rest, because it’s very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing, and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease.”

 

According to what I have heard, true love is not divided and must be voluntary, not forced. If this is true, as I believe it is, why do you want to force me to surrender my will, obliged to do so simply because you say you love me?

 

“Even so, I want you to know, brother Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “that there is no memory that time does not erase, no pain not ended by death.”

 

“Have I acted so badly with you, Sancho,” Don Quixote responded, “that you wish to see me dead so soon?” “That’s not the reason,” Sancho replied, “but I don’t like keeping secrets, and I wouldn’t want them to spoil because I kept them too long.”

 

“It is your fear, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that keeps you from seeing or hearing properly, because one of the effects of fear is to cloud the senses and make things appear other than they are; if you are so frightened, withdraw somewhere and leave me alone; alone I suffice to give victory to the army to whom I shall proffer my assistance.”

 

“Your grace, come back, Señor Don Quixote, I swear to God you’re charging sheep! Come back, by the wretched father who sired me! What madness is this? Look and see that there are no giants or knights, no cats or armor or shields either parted or whole, no blue vairs or bedeviled ones, either. Poor sinner that I am in the sight of God, what are you doing?”

 

Sancho came so close that his eyes were almost in his master’s mouth; by this time the balm had taken effect in Don Quixote’s stomach, and just as Sancho looked into his mouth, he threw up, more vigorously than if he were firing a musket, everything he had inside, and all of it hit the compassionate squire in the face.

You should know, Sancho, that a man is not worth more than any other if he does not do more than any other.

“I don’t know how you can speak of righting wrongs,” said the bachelor, “for you have certainly wronged me and broken my leg, which won’t ever be right again; and in rectifying my injuries, you have injured me so much that I’ll go on being injured for the rest of my life; it was a great misadventure for me to run across a man who is seeking adventures.”

 

“There’s no reason to waste time and money making that face,” said Sancho. “What your grace should do instead is uncover yours and show it to those who are looking at you, and right away, without any images or shields, they’ll call you The Knight of the Sorrowful Face; believe me, I’m telling you the truth, because I promise your grace, Señor, and I’m only joking, that hunger and your missing teeth give you such a sorry-looking face that, as I’ve said, you can easily do without the sorrowful picture.”

 

“Fate has willed that I cannot help listening to you, and so continue.”

 

If your misfortune were one that had all doors closed to any sort of consolation, I intended to help you weep and lament to the best of my ability, for it is still a consolation in affliction to find someone who mourns with you.

 

The Knight of the Forest, who heard the Knight of the Sorrowful Face speak in this way, did nothing but look at him, and look at him again, and look at him one more time, from head to toe;

 

A knight errant deserves neither glory nor thanks if he goes mad for a reason.       

 

The great achievement is to lose one’s reason for no reason, and to let my lady know that if I can do this without cause, what should I not do if there were cause?

 

“Do not waste your time, Señora, in offering anything to this woman, since it is her custom never to give thanks for anything that is done for her, and do not encourage her to respond, unless you wish to hear her tell a lie.”

 

The poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

 

 “Trust in God, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that everything will turn out well and perhaps even better than you expect; not a leaf quivers on a tree unless God wills it.”

 

Historians who make use of lies ought to be burned.

History is like a sacred thing; it must be truthful, and wherever truth is, there God is; but despite this, there are some who write and toss off books as if they were fritters.

“There is no book so bad,” said the bachelor, “that it does not have something good in it.”

The best sauce in the world is hunger, and since poor people have plenty of that, they always eat with great pleasure.

“Once or twice,” responded Sancho, “if I remember correctly, I’ve asked your grace not to correct my words if you understand what I mean by them, and when you don’t understand, to say: ‘Sancho, you devil, I don’t understand you,’ and if I can’t explain, then you can correct me; I’m so plaint. . . .” “I do not understand you, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “because I do not know what I am so plaint means.” “So plaint means,” responded Sancho, “That’s just the way I am.”

 

We must slay pride by slaying giants; slay envy with generosity and a good heart; anger with serene bearing and tranquility of spirit; gluttony and sleep by eating little and watching always; lust and lasciviousness by maintaining our fealty toward those whom we have made mistresses of our thoughts; sloth by wandering everywhere in the world, seeking those occasions when we may become famous knights as well as Christians.

 “Oh, well, if none of you understand me,” responded Sancho, “it’s no wonder my sayings are taken for nonsense. But it doesn’t matter: I understand what I’m saying, and I know there’s not much foolishness in what I said, but your grace is always sentencing what I say, and even what I do.” “Censuring is what you should say,” said Don Quixote, “and not sentencing, you corrupter of good language, may God confound you!”

“Is that the kind of talk appropriate to this place?” “Señor,” responded Sancho, “each person must talk of what he needs no matter where he is; here I remembered about my donkey, and here I talked about him; if I remembered about him in the stable, I’d talk about him there.”

“You cite so many witnesses, Sancho, and so many particulars, that I cannot help but say that you must be telling the truth. But proceed, and shorten the story, because you are on the way to not concluding for another two days.” “You’re on the way to not finishing your story until you’re in the next world.” “I’ll stop when I’m less than halfway there, God willing,”

Be a father to virtues and a stepfather to vices. Do not always be severe, or always mild, but choose the middle way between those two extremes; this is the object of wisdom. Visit the prisons, the slaughterhouses, and the market squares, for the presence of the governor in these places is of great importance: it consoles the prisoners, who can hope for a quick release; it frightens the butchers, who then make their weights honest; it terrifies the market women, and for the same reason.    

 And this doctor says about himself that he doesn’t cure diseases when they’ve arrived but prevents them so they won’t come, and the medicines he uses are diet and more diet until the person’s nothing but skin and bones, as if being skinny weren’t a worse ailment than having a fever.

 

“What did you get from your governorship?” asked Ricote. “I got,” responded Sancho, “the lesson that I’m not good for governing unless it’s a herd of livestock, and that the riches you can gain in governorships come at the cost of your rest and your sleep and even your food, because on ínsulas the governors have to eat very little, especially if they have doctors who are looking out for their health.”

 

Trying to restrain the tongues of slanderers is the same as trying to put doors in a field.

 

“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; lacking them, Altisidora declared her desires, which gave rise in my bosom to more confusion than compassion.”

 

I often stop to look at your grace from the tips of your toes to the last hair on your head, and I see more things to drive her away than to make her fall in love; I’ve also heard that beauty is the first and principal quality that makes people love, and since your grace doesn’t have any, I don’t know what the poor maiden fell in love with.”  

 

“Look, Sancho,” responded Don Quixote, “I say proverbs when they are appropriate, and when I say them they fit like the rings on your fingers, but you drag them in by the hair, and pull them along, and do not guide them, and if I remember correctly, I have already told you that proverbs are brief maxims derived from the experience and speculation of wise men in the past, and if the proverb is not to the point, it is not a maxim, it is nonsense.

 

   

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