“…which the Queen Doña Maguncia, the Princess Antonomasia’s mother, so took to heart, that within the space of three days we buried her.”

“She died, no doubt,” said Sancho.

Though I have no personal experience of it, I’m told that people who complete marathons customarily get a tee-shirt announcing their accomplishment. I think anyone who finishes Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote ought to get one too (mine would be XXXL), featuring the date and illustrated with an image of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance tilting at windmills. Henceforth let no man call me illiterate.

What do I think of the whole thing? DQ is certainly a book worth having read. Like the Bible, it’s full of cultural references an informed person ought to know about. And there are certainly funny moments, as in the excerpt above.

But one of the things a modern reader learns from reading it is how different our world, and our thinking, are from those of Miguel de Cervantes. This is a man who respects the Inquisition, and takes it for granted that trashy books ought to be burned. He’s not evil – he’s a man of his time and place.

There’s the case of the Moriscos, for instance. The Moriscos were descendants of the Spanish Moors who had – ostensibly – converted to Christianity from Islam. A few years back, the king had banished them all, based on accusations of plots against himself. The novel includes two separate subplots concerning Christian gentlemen who fall in love with beautiful Morisco girls. In each case Cervantes strives to find resolutions by which the individual girls, who are always true Catholics, might be allowed to marry their sweethearts and remain in the country. But it’s taken for granted (and even the Moriscos themselves admit, in Cervantes’ account) that the expulsions were entirely justified.

There’s also a sequence where, with the encouragement of the Duchess, who loves to put Don Quixote through his mad paces, a young lady of her court pretends to fall passionately in love with him, to test his faithfulness to his lady Dulcinea. Don Quixote withstands the temptation to go to bed with her. We are informed, matter-of-factly, that the girl is 14 or 15 years old. There is, in Cervantes’ world, nothing scandalous about her age.

There’s a strange quality of metanarrative present in the second book of Don Quixote. Cervantes was largely goaded into finishing the book by the appearance of an unauthorized sequel, which was (according to him) unimaginative and poorly written. Don Quixote himself is told about this book in the course of the story, and goes so far, in one episode, as to choose to ride to Barcelona instead of to Salamanca, simply because the bogus book sent him to Salamanca. The intrusion of real life into the novel timeline raises all kinds of questions of subtext and alternate realities, which have no doubt been dealt with by critics. I’m not sure the scenario described by Cervantes is actually self-consistent, but trying to puzzle it all out seems like more work than I care to take on.

What impressed me most in my reading, though, was something I’ve mentioned before. While the duchess delights in playing tricks on Don Quixote, she reserves actual physical insults for Sancho Panza. We’re meant to laugh when Sancho is poked with pins, or lashed until he bleeds. Because Sancho is a peasant, his body doesn’t deserve the respect accorded the body of a nobleman. He’s a buffoon, the clown of the story, made of rubber like a character in a cartoon. His pain is meant to be hilarious.

My egalitarianism is, of course, another anachronism I shouldn’t try to impose on Cervantes, who knew nothing of such things. It’s unjust of me, really.

But I can’t quite avoid it.

So do I recommend Don Quixote?

I recommend it for anyone who wants to read it. If you don’t, I can’t criticize you greatly. You should probably read a condensed edition, though.

“…so Samson Carrasco told me, and he’s at any rate one that’s a bachelor of Salamanca, and people of that sort can’t lie, except when the whim seizes them or they have some good reason for it.” (Sancho Panza)

It’s getting to the point where I have trouble remembering a time before I was reading Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. According to my Kindle, I’m about 75% through it now, and I still have nearly 7 hours of reading to do. I don’t imagine I’ll be finished before sometime this weekend.

The profound literary insight that’s made me so rich and famous has enabled me to identify plot parallels between Book 1 and Book 2. In each book, a large portion of the story’s latter half is taken up with a kind of a drama. In the first book, the drama isn’t labeled as such, but the story takes on the form of a stage play. A large group of people are gathered in an inn, and the Aristotelean unities of place and time are observed – three (if I remember correctly) pairs of sundered lovers just happen to be present at once, and obstacles to their love are overcome, leading to happy romantic endings.

In Book 2, the drama is more overt. Don Quixote and Sancho happen upon a hunting party led by a duke and duchess, who turn out to have read Book 1. They are Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s Biggest Fans, and they proceed to merrily torture them, somewhat in the style of Kathy Bates in Misery, though with more charm.

Employing their considerable financial resources, the couple stage scenarios where costumed players present themselves as devils and wizards and ladies in distress, purposely enabling the old madman’s delusions, for the pure entertainment derived from seeing how far he’ll go in his self-destruction. The duchess delights in toying with Sancho, playing on his desire to be governor of an island, testing how far he’ll debase himself in exchange for that prize.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit I found some of it funny.

Being a professional social conservative, I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to the old class system. But as I contemplate the humor in Don Quixote, Book 2, I begin to feel like a Jeffersonian Republican. I even start to sympathize with the French Jacobins. Whom I loathe.

But there’s more of Don Quixote to read, so maybe this stage will pass.

A further counsel bear in mind:
If that thy roof be made of glass, 
It shows small wit to pick up stones 
To pelt the people as they pass.

“Sir, one solitary swallow does not make the summer….”

“…for it is my great familiarity with thee that has bred this contempt.”

I’ll need to beg your forbearance for a few days – or weeks. I feel I must cut back on my book-buying for a while, so I made up my mind to tackle one of those big, classic books that I’ve been putting off. Therefore I chose Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. This project must inevitably take a long, long time, because it’s a long, long book.

I’m not unacquainted with Don Quixote, since I read an edited version back when I was in high school. But I recall a college professor saying that shortened versions omit some of the most delightful parts. I’m curious to see what those delightful parts are, because – to tell the truth – what I’ve read of the book to date has never given me a lot of pleasure.

[At the top of this post I list a few common aphorisms I found in the text. Whether Cervantes coined them or borrowed them, I have no idea.]

I think of Don Quixote as “the book that, when they wanted to make a successful musical out of it, they had to turn its meaning completely on its head.”

Which brings me back to my old do-it-yourself psychological diagnosis – you can figure out any person’s neurosis through discovering what they don’t find funny. When we neurotics recognize ourselves in a joke, the humor drops abruptly through the floor.

I, for instance, am not much amused by stories about deluded bookworms who make fools of themselves in the world, and get laughed at behind their backs.

Anyway, I’m still less than a quarter through in my reading, and I’ve come up with one thought that may or may be of value: Don Quixote is the ancestor of the modern college graduate, who has been force-fed so much otherworldly theory that he can’t see reality at all. The liberal who observes a city sidewalk covered with homeless tents and human excrement, and calls it “vibrant,” is brother to Knight of the Doleful Countenance, who thought windmills were giants and country inns castles. The liberal who sees a tattooed thug beating up an old woman to steal her purse, and calls him a victim of racism, was foreshadowed when Don Quixote liberated a group of convicts on their way to the galleys, only to be pelted with stones by them.