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.