The Birthday Paradox

Don Quixote bears down on a windmill in the distance. (Gift by Lorna, art by Ricardo Breceda, photo by Andy McRory)Wife Lorna outdid herself this year for my birthday. She gave me a life-sized metalwork of Don Quixote sitting high astride his faithful steed Rocinante. And that’s saying something, because Lorna's pretty much been outdoing herself for the 45 years of our marriage. But this one…this gift… could not have been better timed.  Miquel Cervantes, Don Quixote's creator, is most famous--even among the casually literate--for introducing the expression tilting at windmills into the lexicon. It’s a derogatory expression usually aimed at someone who is engaged in a futile task or someone who imagines dangers where there are none.

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.
"Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length."

I’ve occasionally been accused of tilting at windmills myself…as recently as this past year in fact. I rode into my retirement jousting over the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth. This gift of mine is not only a marvel of time, but of space. As it happens, our Quixote stands on a slope overlooking our neighbor’s windmill.Nonetheless, it could be that like Don Quixote himself my adventures are now in my rearview mirror, and like Quixote in his retirement I must reassess my life mission. Will I, like Quixote, end up renouncing the main influencers on my life? On his death bed Quixote forswears  the tales of chivalry that inspired him to venture off imagining himself a knight-errant committed to saving the world. He so completely denies his prior existence--dismissing it as the product of an insane mind--that he tells his beloved niece and heir that if she even reads one book of chivalry, she will forfeit her inheritance.

The instant Don Quixote saw them he exclaimed, “Good news for you, good sirs, that I am no longer Don Quixote of LaMancha…odious to me now are all the profane stories of knight-errantry; now I perceive my folly, and the peril into which reading them brought me; now, by God’s mercy schooled into my right senses, I loathe them.”

Might it come to that for me? Might I rewrite my last will and testament with a warning to my heirs that if they ever want what’s coming to them they’re never to read Norman O. Brown? The irony is that in the last chapter of his masterpiece, Cervantes has Don Quixote doing exactly what Norman O. Brown says must ultimately be done…he drops the persona…the mask that he wore through life. In Love’s Body, Nobby writes:

In the Last Judgment the apocalyptic fire will burn up all the masks, and the theater, leaving not a rack behind. Freud came to give the show away; the outcome of psychoanalysis is not “ego-psychology” but the doctrine of “anatta” or no-self: the ego is a “me-fabrication”…a piece of illusion (Maya), which disintegrates at the moment of illumination: “the self has been completely understood, and so ceases to be.” And with the doctrine of no-self goes the doctrine of non-action: action is proper only to an ignorant person, and doing nothing is, if rightly understood, the supreme action.

Here's where the birthday paradox comes in (and boy do I ever love paradoxes). I'm quite prepared...intellectually at least...to reach the point Don Quixote reaches at the end where I see nothing but madness in those things that inspired and shaped my past actions...my books, my music, my movies, my politics, my science, my religion, all my me-fabrications. I can already sense inklings of a strange new distancing from these things rising up inside of me. But I see this possibility only because of Love's Body...because all along...through my 40 years of study and advocacy of Norman O. Brown...I've been constantly re-educated and reminded of what an illusion life is...most particularly my view of it. It may one day become apparent to me that every fierce giant I ever laid eyes on and did battle against was nothing more than a windmill. I'm braced and ready for that truth to be revealed to me. That's my acquired wisdom...my birthday gift to myself.