Why are dragons afraid of Americans?

The chief business of an essayist — I speak here of the kind of essayist that I occasionally manage to be, and that better men than I are sometimes reduced to when not at their best — is to tilt at windmills. The second greatest delight such an essayist can know is to tilt at a windmill, in the full knowledge and expectation that it is really a windmill, and that he shall end by making a quixotic fool of himself, and discover in the heat of combat that it is only a giant after all.

I say ‘only a giant’ advisedly. A windmill is an awful thing, in more than one sense of the word: a soulless creature born of sheer inanimate nature, grinding without desire, crushing without intent, turning its tireless arms in response to a commandment more inexorable than the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not. I believe that the windmill was invented by Koshchei the Deathless, while wearing the guise in which he used to appear to James Branch Cabell — ‘the Lord of Things As They Are’, as Cabell called him. How wonderful it is, then, having tried one’s lance against a windmill, to find that after all it is just another creature of flesh and blood like oneself — bigger and stronger, no doubt, but just as fallible, just as uncertain, just as liable to err, to weary, and to die. The greatest delight of an essayist is to tilt at a windmill and find that it really is a windmill, that one has crossed lances, in some way, with the fundamental bedrock of reality. But that experience is a great deal rarer.

So I spend a lot of my time tilting at windmills, and most of them, as it turns out, are nothing but giants. This language is figurative. I mean that I pick quarrels with the conventional wisdom or fashionable opinion that different sorts of people are apt to accept as unalterable truth; and then I find that they are only opinions, and dubiously founded ones at that — or else I do not. Since both conventional wisdom and fashionable opinion are fallible and largely wrong, and nearly everybody takes comfort in one or the other, I make a terrible nuisance of myself to virtually everybody. In the past, for instance, I have gone jousting in aid of Ursula K. Le Guin, and particularly for her views on the diction and rhetoric of fantasy, though she needs my help almost as much as a whale needs a life jacket. Today I feel the urge to turn my lance against her, or against one of her windmills, and see whether I score a hit on a giant.

Read the rest at bondwine.com. . . .