My opinion of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel, Don Quixote, based on reading a condensed version long ago, has always been that it’s a very long, difficult book that people read out of a sense of duty, but that few actually enjoy much.
I’m almost 70% through reading it now, and to be honest my opinion hasn’t changed a lot. It was a hilarious book by 17th Century standards, but it’s mostly plain hard work today. Despite amusing moments.
Today’s reading was highlighted by two major scenes. In the first, Don Quixote wishes to view a famous cave, and is lowered into its mouth on a rope by his servant Sancho Panza and their guide. While in the cave, the knight apparently loses consciousness and has a vivid hallucination, which he afterwards relates to his companions. It involves – of course – a castle and a couple famous knights, along with a brief vision of his own lady fair, Dulcinea.
Another big scene is a puppet show presented in an inn (I wish the author had described it in more detail – I couldn’t figure out whether the puppets were marionettes, hand puppets, or shadow puppets. No doubt Cervantes scholars have worked it out). Don Quixote, overwhelmed by the excitement of the drama, comes to the main characters’ rescue, smashing several puppets with his sword. He lives his life poised on the knife edge of delusion.
A topic I meant to discuss in an earlier post, but lost track of, was that of beauty. In a scene in Book 1, Don Quixote discusses with his friend the curate whether books of Chivalric Romance were true stories or not. The curate points out that the books are full of impossible creatures and incidents. Don Quixote’s response appeals to the spiritual – the stories must be true, he argues, because they’re so beautiful.
That’s a fascinating point, so packed that I can’t begin to deal with it here.
Keats wrote in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” All my life I took that as a poet’s hyperbole. More recently I’ve been thinking there’s more to it.
Andrew Klavan’s book, The Truth and Beauty is one I’ve read several times without entirely figuring its point out. But it’s something to do with the idea that Beauty is a real expression of God Himself. In our mundane world, many beautiful things are corrupted by sin, but Beauty in itself is always a pointer to the Gospel. This is particularly notable in the experience of transcendent beauty, as when Wordsworth beheld a field of daffodils, or when Keats contemplated his Grecian urn. Wordsworth’s ecstatic experience of the daffodils actually led him on the road to Christian faith. Klavan thinks Keats would have become a Christian if he’d lived longer.
And it occurs to me that when a sinner repents and turns to Christ during an altar call, breaking down in remorse and suddenly in love with Christ, he’s having an experience not entirely different from those.
Nevertheless, Cervantes insists Don Quixote is wrong. In this world we live in, a thing can be both beautiful and bad. Beauty can be seductive, in a woman or in a story, or in an ideology. Socialism, for instance, is a beautiful ideology that springs from Romantic aspirations. But it leads away from God, and ends in death.