The Possible Dream
The Quixotic Wisdom of Don Quijote’s Sancho
by Bernardo Aparicio García
Quixotic is an adjective that—though not necessarily complimentary—has thoroughly benign connotations. I might not be pleased
if someone described my endeavors as quixotic, but I would not therefore judge myself maligned; I would understand the person who so described them to mean, not that my activities were lacking in goodness, but rather that they suffered from an excess of it. Don Quijote, Cervantes’s mad knight from La Mancha, has passed into the popular imagination as the archetype of a dreamer whose dreams are only too noble for the world. He is the idealist par excellence—a fundamentally good man, only too naïve or too crazy to realize that he cannot save the world.
This characterization does not seem too far off the mark, but perhaps such a portrayal should give us pause. One hears much talk these days of saving the world—whether that means a grand scheme to make it safe for democracy or to stop a global warming apocalypse. In this sense a culture-wide pilgrimage to La Mancha seems long overdue. Cervantes reminds us that there is only a fine line separating the starry-eyed idealist who wants to save the world and the hardened ideologue who wants to recreate it in his image. The man who wants to leave his mark because he loves the world may one day gaze into the mirror and find a man who wants to do so only because he loves himself.
These character types are in certain ways contradictory, and yet they seem inextricably entangled. As Don Quijote continues his adventures in the second volume of the novel—having learned to his astonishment that a book narrating his previous exploits has been published—it becomes increasingly difficult to discern what character type better suits him. Knowledge of the book seems to cast a shadow on his mind, bringing the sustained purity of his motives into question. Is Don Quijote straddling the line between idealism and egomania? And if idealism cannot save him, what can? It may be that darker undertones lie just beneath the surface of the quixotic.
Consider a pair of conversations that occur toward the beginning of each volume of the novel. The chapters in which they take place are generally lacking in the sort of wild adventures that characterize the book, and it is all too easy to skim over them in anticipation of new exploits, yet the reader who is willing to pause and ponder them will find his time rewarded. In each of these conversations, Don Quijote not only reveals important facets of his mind and motives, but as he faces the challenges of questioners, he actually develops his thought concerning knight-errantry as a philosophy of life.
The Knightly Vocation
In chapter thirteen of volume one, as Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, his squire, are traveling with a group of goatherds to the funeral of a love-struck shepherd, they run into another group of travelers on their way to the same event. In the group is a gentleman who takes an interest in Don Quijote. He is surprised to see a man so armed in the midst of “such a peaceful land” (note: translations are my own unless otherwise noted), and so he asks Don Quijote for an explanation.
The latter is, of course, all too eager to satisfy his questioner, and soon the two are embroiled in a conversation about knight-errantry. Vivaldo, the traveling gentleman, soon concludes that his interlocutor must be insane, but in order to amuse himself and satisfy his curiosity, he pretends to take the knight in earnest. Having learned that Don Quijote believes himself a knight-errant, the traveler opines that such a profession must be one of the most austere on earth, and that he believes that “not even that of a Carthusian monk must be so austere.”
It is this comparison between knight-errantry and the religious life that connects this conversation to the one that occurs in chapter eight of volume two, which we shall discuss later. The comparison is not wasted on Don Quijote, who launches into an apologetic for knight-errantry, stating that while the Carthusian vocation may be quite as austere as his own, he is “very close to doubting” that it is “as necessary in this world”:
Bernardo Aparicio García has published short stories and essays in the St. Austin Review and the Catholic literary journal Dappled Things, of which he is founder and publisher. He is also a teacher at the Washington International School in Washington, D.C.
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