Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (illustrated & annotated) - The Unabridged Classic Ormsby Translation fully illustrated by Gustave Doré Translated by John Ormsby Illustrations by Gustave Doré e-artnow, 2021 EAN 4064066446949

Bright Eyes’ Don Quixote https://open.spotify.com/track/6bgjcVqaUmnalHy0C8txLv?si=0BvMB4BTT3eS0LRO359bOg “I thought windmills Turned from the fireworks to watch Their reflection in the tower Made wind.” — Mean Free Path by Ben Lerner https://a.co/0Xizyrg “He walked to the door, looked outside, and then pushed it closed. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You need to know something, Ailey. Nobody in this department ever says they don’t want African Americans in the doctoral program. They say it’s a coincidence that there haven’t been any. Or they say they can’t find one that’s qualified. Okay, well, now you’re here, full of qualifications, and taking the hardest classes and making the highest grades. But they just happened not to give you the mentoring you’ll need to continue to the doctoral program. And that’s how that goes, Ailey. When we come to these all-white spaces, we have to be tough. We can’t show any weakness. I know that’s difficult, but that’s the way it is, and that’s why I’m so hard on you. And I will continue to be hard on you, Ailey, because I want to prepare you for what’s coming. It’s gone be the Thrilla in Manila when you enter the doctoral program. They will throw everything they have at you. If you fail, they’ll say, oh, that’s too bad. You just weren’t smart enough. If you succeed and earn the degree, despite all the obstacles they put up, they’ll take credit for your success and congratulate themselves for fostering a nonprejudiced environment. But, Ailey, you aren’t going to fail, because I am going to help you with every ounce of power that I have, all while pretending that I’m not helping you. For example, you and I never had this conversation. Do you understand me?” He raised his eyebrows. “Yes, sir.” “I have faith in you, Ailey. We’re going to get you to that promised land, and then I’m gone find a tenure-track Black faculty member to replace me, and then I’m gone retire and take myself back to D.C. to a chocolate-covered neighborhood! Nah’mean?” We laughed, and sat there for a long time, talking. He told me, when I spoke again with Uncle Root, please let him know that his book on African American families in the City had been life-changing. Dr. Whitcomb must have read that book five times, back at Harvard. When I gave my apologies, saying I needed to get back to making notes on my research, he told me no apologies were necessary. Dr. Whitcomb understood my obsession. And please keep him updated on my progress in the archives. He especially wanted to hear about my Wood Place kin.” — The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Novel by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers https://a.co/hxkMFHm “In 1832, at the age of eleven, Flaubert read Don Quixote, which, together with Goethe and, to a smaller extent, Balzac, constituted his prime literary influences, though he read so widely and deeply that he rivals Montaigne in his ambience. Flaubert seems to have had a form of epilepsy, but the major hazards to his health came from his promiscuity with female and male prostitutes in his Middle Eastern tours. He contracted syphilis early in his life, and died at fifty-eight, but probably from a heart attack brought on by epilepsy.” — The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread by Harold Bloom https://a.co/btsXloU To see the relation between language and human subjectivity in this way is to concur with the structuralists in avoiding what may be called the 'humanist' fallacy - the naive notion that a literary text is just a kind of transcript of the living voice of a real man or woman addressing us. Such a view of literature always tends to find its distinguishing characteristic - the fact that it is written - somehow disturbing: the print, in all its cold impersonality, interposes its ungainly bulk between ourselves and the author. If only we could talk to Cervantes directly! Such an attitude 'dematerializes' literature, strives to reduce its material density as language to the intimate spiritual encounter ofliving 'persons'. It goes along with the liberal humanist suspicion of all that cannot be immediately reduced to the interpersonal, from feminism to factory production. It is not, in the end, concerned with regarding the literary text as a text at all. But if structuralism avoided the humanist fallacy, it did so only to fall into the opposite trap of more or less abolishing human subjects altogether. Eagleton literary theory CERVANTES, in relation to the Spanish language, stands with the titans of European and American literature. He is what Shakespeare is to English, Dante to Italian, Goethe to German, Pushkin to Russian: the glory of the vernacular. There may be no single eminence in French: Rabelais, Racine, Molière, Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Paul Valéry are among writers of the first order. In Russian, Tolstoy alone challenges Pushkin. The Desert Island Question (“ If just one book, which?”) has no universal answer, but many readers would choose among three: the King James Bible, the complete Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Is it an oddity that the three competitors were almost simultaneous? The King James Bible appeared in 1611, six years after the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, in 1605 (the second part came a decade later, in 1615). In 1605, Shakespeare matched the greatness of Cervantes’s masterwork with King Lear, and then went on rapidly to Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.” — The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread by Harold Bloom https://a.co/95rQqXL “On the blacktops and when they traveled, Jeremy was told by other players to open his eyes or return to China, to go to math club or play tennis instead. He was called “Wonton” or names far worse, names every Asian American basketball player hears. In other words, he was told in countless ways great and small that he did not belong on the court with the “real athletes”—until he showed the “real athletes” who the real athlete was. A Japanese proverb is often cited: “The protruding nail attracts the hammer.” Yet there’s a similar Chinese proverb that holds, “The loudest duck gets shot.” Jeremy was a brooder in the first place, and his father advised that he remain calm when he heard racial taunts. “Win the game for your school and people will respect you.” But Jeremy was tempted, and sometimes attempted, to return the taunts or humiliate the mockers for payback. The words hurt and angered him, even if he didn’t always show it. (Ironically, the lone Asian American on the blacktop is now less likely to be called “Yao Ming” than “Jeremy Lin.” So Jeremy has gone from being called Asian monikers to being an Asian moniker.)” — Jeremy Lin: The Reason for the Linsanity by Timothy Dalrymple https://a.co/bFykBt3 “A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. On the other hand, what is this vaunted “real life,” what are these solid “facts”? One is suspicious of them when one sees biologists stalking each other with loaded genes, or battling historians locked in each other’s arms as they roll in the dust of centuries. Whether or not his newspaper and a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called “real life” of the so-called average man, one thing is fortunately certain: namely, that the average man himself is but a piece of fiction, a tissue of statistics.” — Lectures on Don Quixote by Vladimir Nabokov https://a.co/18AKB5D “editorials condemning it. The magazine also serialized the publication of a shattering polemic called The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by a young British economist named John Maynard Keynes. Keynes called Wilson a fool, a “blind and deaf Don Quixote” 104 and pointed out that the peace treaty merely continued the deprivations of wartime, warning that it would bring misery to Europe—“ the rapid depression of the standard of life of the European populations to a point which will mean actual starvation.” Wilson believed that any shortcomings of the terms of the peace could be addressed by the establishment of the League of Nations, since any problem created by the treaty, he reasoned, could be solved by the League. Only the League, he thought, could make peace last. Two days after returning to the United States, he delivered the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate and explained its provisions, including for the League of Nations, asking, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?” 105 In the Senate, what little support Wilson enjoyed came from fellow Democrats; Republicans proved implacable. The Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge, had the 264-page treaty printed, announced that he would convene hearings on the subject, and then all but tabled the matter, stonewalling for two weeks while he had every word read aloud. 106 Wilson, still ailing, decided to canvass the nation and left Washington on September 3, 1919, for a seventeen-state train tour. “I promised our soldiers, when I asked them to take up arms, that it was a war to end wars,” he told his wife. “If I do not do all in my power to put the Treaty into effect, I will be a slacker and never able to look those boys in the eye.” In Nevada, his face began to twitch; in Utah, he sweated through his suit; by Wyoming he was incoherent. Finally, in Colorado, on October 2, 1919, he stumbled while mounting the stage. “I seem to have gone to pieces,” he said. He lost the use of his left side. For five months, he was hidden in the West Wing of the White House, unseen, even by his cabinet.” — These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore https://a.co/3QOkfys “I was among mountains. Huge tufted things. Full of character; but no charm. I was alone with my faithful mule. We were lost. A meteor flew overhead. What use was that to us? No use at all. It merely irritated us. For a moment it showed a track through the fever-dripping ferns. It was obviously the wrong one. It would only have taken us back to a morass we had just spent half a day struggling out of. What a sentence! What a vile sentence, your Ladyship, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Where” — Gormenghast (The Gormenghast Trilogy Book 2) by Mervyn Peake https://a.co/4AMgBuN 🔶 Transcription of Yellow Highlight (from The Ambiguity of Play by Brian Sutton-Smith): “The basic answer is that the focus on the subjectivity of the individual as a way of explaining play is a latter-day expression of the increasing individualization of human life that has occurred throughout the past five hundred years of Western history. This change is spoken of in multiple ways, too many to be presented here. Most authorities place the beginning of the shift at the time of the Renaissance and analyze the increasing differentiation of the self as portrayed in the arts and literature of that time. Michael Beaujour (1984), for example, draws attention to the Renaissance literary theory of the play of selves, which was a revolt against the certainties of Church authority and the veneration of the ancients. He has in mind the kinds of rhetorical and parodic play exhibited in the writings of Rabelais, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Cervantes, and Erasmus in the sixteenth century. He contrasts their notions of the individual’s multiple selves with the dualistic, adult-child, progress-oriented play theories of our own time. Nardo’s The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-century English Literature (1991) gives a similar account of the growth of what the author calls the ludic self in the literary activity of seventeenth-century England, citing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne.” ⸻ 🛡️ Using the Other “Knights” in Don Quixote to Concretize Sutton-Smith’s Theory of the Ludic Self Sutton-Smith’s analysis of the ludic self describes a historical evolution: as the Western individual becomes more differentiated and psychologically interior, play transforms from collective ritual to the performance of multiple, parodic selves. This is embodied not only in Don Quixote but also in the characters who mirror or mock him—each of whom concretizes this idea of subjective multiplicity through ludic improvisation. Below, I map a few of the “other knights” in Books I and II to Sutton-Smith’s concept of the ludic self: ⸻ 1. The Knight of the Wood (aka the Bachelor Sansón Carrasco in disguise) • Ludic Function: Carrasco dons knightly armor to “correct” Don Quixote through performance. • Link to Sutton-Smith: A parodic self who plays at correction while actually indulging in the same delusion—his action is a recursive theatrical revolt against institutional norms (reason, law). • Multiplicity: He is both social critic and trickster; his self fractures between educator, prankster, and fantasist. ⸻ 2. The Knight of the Mirrors • Ludic Function: Another incarnation of Carrasco, this time using literal mirrors. • Link: The mirrors reflect back the absurdity of Quixote’s quest—yet he too is reflected in the silliness. This is the ludic self made literal: reflexive parody as identity. • Multiplicity: A satirical agent whose attempt to correct results only in deeper entanglement. ⸻ 3. The Knight of the White Moon • Ludic Function: Final form of Carrasco’s knightly interventions. • Link: Wins the duel, forcing Don Quixote to return home—but by then, Quixote’s ludic reality has already reconfigured Carrasco’s own. • Multiplicity: Carrasco’s shifting personas show how the ludic self operates on both the self and the Other, undoing linear moral authority. ⸻ 4. Don Quixote Himself • Ludic Core: Performs a chivalric self built from books, dreams, and fading ideals. • Link to Sutton-Smith: Pure product of post-Renaissance self-play. His very break from Church authority and antiquity is in constructing a new, imagined frame of being. • Multiplicity: He is priest, fool, savior, victim, actor, and author all at once. ⸻ 5. The False Don Quixote (Avellaneda’s Imposter) • Ludic Function: A counterfeit Don Quixote appears in Part II. • Link: This external satire forces Cervantes to reassert his Quixote’s ludic authenticity, creating a meta-play of selves. • Multiplicity: The authorial self fractures alongside the character—a duel of realities over who gets to perform “Don Quixote-ness.” ⸻ 6. Sancho Panza as Governor • Ludic Function: Parodies statecraft and reason; Sancho becomes a wise fool. • Link: Sutton-Smith’s idea of anti-authoritarian parody and the construction of subjective legitimacy is embodied here. • Multiplicity: Sancho shifts from rustic squire to mock-statesman, testing institutional scripts through intuitive play. ⸻ 🎭 Summary Sutton-Smith’s claim that individualization gave rise to “the ludic self” finds its richest dramatization in Don Quixote. Each knight—genuine, false, or parodic—acts out what it means to play a self against institutional certainty. Just as Renaissance thinkers revolted against Church authority through playful literature, Cervantes stages selfhood as a mobile, ironic performance—one inseparable from the imagination, fantasy, and failure to conform. Would you like this mapped into a table or a printable summary for students studying Don Quixote as a theatrical text? “a hermit demented by the glory and solitude of God.” — Corelli's Mandolin: A Novel (Vintage International) by Louis de Bernieres https://a.co/ezUGyYC “Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other–other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is child. A ritual, more compelling than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe’s childhood. The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter ‘Weep’. Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak ‘Rejoice!’ O little revolution in great shades!” — Gormenghast (The Gormenghast Trilogy Book 2) by Mervyn Peake https://a.co/7fNKAHs “God and nature made free. Furthermore, these poor wretches have done nothing against you gentlemen. Each man must bear his own sin; there is a God in heaven who does not fail to punish the wicked or reward the good, and it is not right for honorable men to persecute other men who have not harmed them. I ask this quietly and calmly because if you comply, I shall have reason to thank you, and if you do not comply willingly, this lance and this sword, and the valor of this my arm, will force you to comply against your will.” This superbly mad oration soars beyond any question as to who is guilty or innocent. We love the Knight because his politics are anarchist. The “order of play” must overturn every social order and every constraint. We need not ask whether Cervantes endorses the stance of Don Quixote.” — The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread by Harold Bloom https://a.co/bsY0G3O “ DonQuixoteis not 'about' the character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique. Animal Farm for the Formalists would not be an allegory of Stalinism; on the contrary, Stalinism would simply provide a useful opportunity for the construction of an allegory. It was this perverse insistence which won for the Formalists their derogatory name from their antagonists; and though they did not deny that art had a relation to social reality indeed some of them were closely associated with the Bolsheviks - they provocatively claimed that this relation was not the critic's business. Eagleton the middle of the fifteenth century, Prince Henry of Portugal began sending ships to sail along the western coast of Africa. Building forts on the coast and founding colonies on islands, they began to trade with African merchants, buying and selling people, coin for flesh, a traffic in slaves. Columbus, a citizen of the bustling Mediterranean port of Genoa, served as a sailor on Portuguese slave-trading ships beginning in 1482. In 1484, when he was about thirty-three years old, he presented to the king of Portugal a plan to travel to Asia by sailing west, across the ocean. The king assembled a panel of scholars to consider the proposal but, in the end, rejected it: Portugal was committed to its ventures in West Africa, and the king’s scholars saw that Columbus had greatly underestimated the distance he would have to travel. Better calculated was the voyage of Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese nobleman, who in 1487 rounded the southernmost tip of Africa, proving that it was possible to sail from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Why sail west, across the Atlantic, when a different way to sail to the East had already been found?” — These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore https://a.co/fDfBpV9 Here is a transcription of the highlighted text: ‘It is. I am sorry, but it is. Every nation has its share of shits. All those thugs and nonentities who want to feel superior. Exactly the same thing happened in Italy, they all joined the Fascists to see what they could get. All sons of clerks and peasants who wanted to be something. All ambition and no ideals. Don’t you see the appeal of an army? If you want a girl, rape her. If you want a watch, take it. If you’re in a sour mood, kill someone. You feel better, you feel strong. It feels good to belong to the chosen people, you can do what you want, and you can justify anything by saying it’s a law of nature or the will of God.’ Corelli madolin ‘We have a proverb: “Give courage to a peasant and he’ll jump in your bed.”’ ‘I like that other one you told me.’ ‘ “Bean by bean the sack fills”? What’s that got to do with it?’ ‘No, no, no. “If you sleep with babies you’ll be pissed on.” I’ve been pissed on, koritsimou, and I wish I’d never joined the Army. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but look what’s happened.’ From bbc podcast https://open.spotify.com/episode/67c26oeEqOEPIxpqmKe4U2?si=DHLLuziDTmuk-Yz7lfHBDQ&t=964&context=spotify%3Aplaylist%3A37i9dQZF1FgnTBfUlzkeKt 31 novels A novel with its own bibliography Gothic horror Liked variety and constant changing of topics and subjects Ambition “Attaining the right to vote also divided the women’s movement between those who wanted to pursue equal rights and those who, realizing that equal rights would render obsolete an entire body of protective labor legislation, did not. So-called equalizers formed the Women’s League for Equal Opportunity and the Equal Rights Association; sought passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced into Congress in 1923; and viewed protectionism with cynicism and suspicion: “Labor men wanted protective laws for women only so that they could steal women’s jobs under cover of chivalry,” one equalizer would write in 1929. Protectionists, meanwhile, formed the League of Women Voters. 112 A half century later, as the Equal Rights Amendment at last neared ratification, this same divide, among women, would defeat it.” — These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore ““What did your mother always say? ‘After eating nine hundred rats, the cat goes on a pilgrimage.’ ”” — The Bandit Queens: A Novel by Parini Shroff https://a.co/6izbhVA “For a moment so huge a sense of himself swam inside Titus as to make the figures in the castle like puppets in his imagination. He would pull them up in one hand and drop them into the moat when he returned–if he returned. He would not be their slave any more! Who was he to be told to go to school: to attend this and to attend that? He was not only the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, he was Titus Groan in his own right. ‘All right, then!’ he shouted to himself, ‘I’ll show them!’ And, digging his heels into his horse’s flanks, he headed for the Mountain.” — Gormenghast (The Gormenghast Trilogy Book 2) by Mervyn Peake https://a.co/2mUOC4I The passage highlighted in blue—“sets up a play of unconscious drives in the text which threatens to split apart received social meanings”—most closely aligns with Chapter 3: Play as Power and Identity in Brian Sutton-Smith’s The Ambiguity of Play. ⸻ WHY: 1. Disruption of Fixed Structures (Core of Chapter 3): Sutton-Smith’s third chapter interrogates how play can act subversively against normative social and linguistic structures—especially those that enforce fixed identities or hierarchical power arrangements. The phrase “split apart received social meanings” directly speaks to this idea. Sutton-Smith argues that play is not merely escapist or recreational; it challenges, mocks, and reconfigures cultural scripts—precisely what the semiotic does in Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory. Just as Sutton-Smith observes how “identity play” may destabilize rigid roles (gender, class, authority), Kristeva’s semiotic play unsettles dominant patriarchal meaning-making systems by inserting unconscious, rhythmic, bodily drives into language—undermining symbolic fixity. ⸻ 2. “Unconscious Drives” and the Hidden Scripts of Play: Kristeva’s claim that the semiotic “sets up a play of unconscious drives” maps onto Sutton-Smith’s treatment of the rhetoric of power—in which play contains latent social forces (aggression, resistance, identity experimentation) that are not always visible on the surface. Sutton-Smith notes that power play is not always overt—children’s role-playing games, for instance, may subtly interrogate or invert adult authority. The unconscious drive in Kristeva’s text functions similarly: it is disruptive, fluid, and irreverent to traditional structures of meaning. ⸻ 3. The Threat to “Received Social Meanings”: This directly invokes Sutton-Smith’s argument that play resists singular, dominant narratives—such as those of work, discipline, and rational order. The semiotic—as Kristeva frames it—is dangerous precisely because it is unpredictable and destabilizing. It offers a kind of symbolic anarchy through rhythm, ambiguity, and maternal association. Just as Sutton-Smith critiques how societies try to control or instrumentalize play through education or discipline, Kristeva shows how symbolic systems try to repress the semiotic—yet it persists as a pressure, a rhythm, a linguistic mischief-maker. ⸻ Why Not the Other Chapters? • Chapter 1 (Progress) and Chapter 2 (Fate) are more concerned with play as developmental or ritualistic forces, which lack the kind of linguistic subversion described here. • Chapter 4 (Imaginary) comes close, but leans more toward creative fantasy than linguistic rupture. • Chapter 5 (Frivolity) and Chapter 6 (Self) deal more with marginalization and internal expression than ideological or symbolic disruption. ⸻ TL;DR Summary: Kristeva’s semiotic, as a fluid, rhythmic, unconscious play of language that splits apart received meanings, is a textual manifestation of what Sutton-Smith identifies in Chapter 3: Play as Power and Identity—a disruptive force that undermines ideological order, identity fixity, and patriarchal linguistic dominance through pleasure, pressure, and play. Adding Cervantes and Laurence Sterne to the mix deepens the resonance between Kristeva’s semiotic disruption and Sutton-Smith’s “Play as Power and Identity”—each author uniquely exemplifies the semiotic as a literary and affective force that destabilizes rational, patriarchal meaning-making. ⸻ Cervantes: Don Quixote as Semiotic Play Cervantes’ Don Quixote enacts the very “play of unconscious drives in the text” that Kristeva identifies: • Linguistic Anarchy: Don Quixote’s delusions fracture the shared social code—windmills become giants, inns become castles. This is a literal semiotic rupture: language no longer serves fixed referents but obeys inner drives, dreams, and disordered memories. • Subversion of Social Norms: The knight errant, a dead genre, becomes reanimated through Quixote’s psyche—splitting apart received social meanings of honor, masculinity, and authority. He’s not only delusional; he’s dangerous to a stable signifying world. • Echo with Kristeva: Cervantes presents a pre-Oedipal jouissance—a body-driven engagement with text and world. Sancho’s earthy proverbs mirror the semiotic’s pulsing rhythm; Quixote’s breakdowns reflect the incoherence of repression. In Sutton-Smith’s terms, Cervantes stages identity as a game, a mask worn so seriously it reveals the arbitrariness of all roles—knight, squire, lover, madman—thus enacting power play through literary form. ⸻ Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy’s Semiotic Excess Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is pure semiotic mischief—a rhythmic, contradictory, and recursive disruption of linear narrative and rational language: • Typographical Play: Sterne inserts black pages, marbled pages, dashes, and squiggles—material pressures within language itself, as Kristeva puts it. • Temporal Disruption: Tristram’s birth takes volumes to narrate. The story resists chronological logic, mirroring the semiotic’s resistance to symbolic order. • Embodiment and Rhythm: Sterne’s prose mimics bodily rhythms—pauses, ejaculations, and stutters. The text pulses like a maternal heartbeat, refusing the phallic finality of patriarchal syntax. • Gender and the Mother: The novel opens with a sexual faux pas and a mother’s voice interrupting coitus—a literal entrance of the maternal into a system dominated by father-law structures. Sutton-Smith would identify Sterne’s work as identity play run amok—a refusal of social coherence in favor of errant joy, contradiction, and the undermining of literary authority. In this way, Tristram Shandy becomes a semiotic explosion against the symbolic father of Enlightenment reason. ⸻ Synthesis: Cervantes, Sterne, Kristeva, Sutton-Smith All four figures agree: language, identity, and social order are not fixed—they are played, undermined, re-rhythmed, and joyfully disassembled: • Kristeva’s semiotic disrupts patriarchal signification. • Sutton-Smith’s play destabilizes identity and power structures. • Cervantes’ Quixote re-writes reality according to dream logic. • Sterne’s Shandy deconstructs narrative through bodily impulse and poetic subversion. Each reveals that beneath the symbolic order lies a field of madness, music, and maternal mischief—a kind of pre-Oedipal ludic force that questions the Law itself. Would you like a visual matrix or flowchart tying these thinkers together across symbolic/semiotic, linguistic/play, and authority/identity axes? “We were dug in with the Mrava Massif behind us. This means nothing unless you know that it was uninhabited, a savage place of ravines and chasms, crude and monstrous crags, roadless, a place through which our supplies could not be brought. We were in a land that the Greeks had always considered theirs by right, and which they had twice ceded by treaty. Now they wanted it back. We were wrapped in mist, enveloped in snow, and an accursed Arctic wind sprang up from the north that flung itself upon us like the bunched fist of a Titan.” — Corelli's Mandolin: A Novel (Vintage International) by Louis de Bernieres https://a.co/gPx7mW8 “‘The proverb says that threatened men live long,’ he tells her, lightly.” — Charles Dickens: The Complete Novels (The Greatest Writers of All Time Book 1) by Charles Dickens https://a.co/0tCqdKt “And the battle-clouds changed their shapes momently, now crawling across the firmament of his imagination like redskins, now whipping like red fish over the mountains, their heads like the heads of the ancient carp in Gormenghast moat, but their bodies trailing behind in festoons like rags or autumn foliage. And the sky, through which these creatures swam, endlessly, in multitudes, became the ocean and the mountains below them were under-water corals, and the red sun became the eye of a subaqueous god, glowering across the sea bed. But the great eye lost its menace, for it became no bigger than the marble in Titus’ hand: for, wading towards him hip deep through the waters, dilating as they neared until they pressed out and broke the frame of fancy, was a posse of pirates.” — Gormenghast (The Gormenghast Trilogy Book 2) by Mervyn Peake https://a.co/gkcDUem Perfect — I’ll add natural paragraph breaks where the scenes or emotional beats shift clearly, so that it reads more cleanly when you paste it elsewhere. Here’s your refined version with intentional spacing: ⸻ The vicomte! It was the vicomte! She turned to stare: the street was empty. And the encounter left her so crushed, so immeasurably sad, that she leaned against a wall to keep from falling. Then she thought that she might be mistaken. How could she tell? She had no way of knowing. Everything—everything within her, everything without—was abandoning her. She felt lost, rolling dizzily down into some dark abyss; and she was almost glad, when she reached the Croix-Rouge, to see good old Monsieur Homais. He was watching a case of pharmaceutical supplies being loaded onto the Hirondelle, and in his hand he carried a present for his wife—six cheminots wrapped in a foulard handkerchief. Madame Homais was particularly fond of those heavy turban-shaped rolls, which the Rouennais eat in Lent with salted butter—a last relic of Gothic fare, going back perhaps to the times of the Crusades. The lusty Normans of those days gorged themselves on cheminots, picturing them as the heads of Saracens, to be devoured by the light of yellow torches along with flacons of spiced wine and giant slabs of meat. Like those ancients, the apothecary’s wife crunched them heroically, despite her wretched teeth; and every time Monsieur Homais made a trip to the city he faithfully brought some back to her, buying them always at the best baker’s, in the Rue Massacre. ⸻ Madness began to take hold of her; she was frightened, but managed to control herself—without, however, emerging from her confusion, for the cause of her horrible state—the question of money—had faded from her mind. It was only her love that was making her suffer, and she felt her soul leave her at the thought—just as a wounded man, as he lies dying, feels his life flowing out with his blood through the gaping hole. Night was falling; crows flew overhead. It suddenly seemed to her that fiery particles were bursting in the air, like bullets exploding as they fell, and spinning and spinning and finally melting in the snow among the tree branches. In the center of each of them appeared Rodolphe’s face. They multiplied; they came together; they penetrated her; everything vanished. She recognized the lights of houses, shining far off in the mist. Suddenly her plight loomed before her, like an abyss. She panted as though her lungs would burst. Then, with a heroic resolve that made her almost happy, she ran down the hill and across the cow plank, ran down the river path and the lane, crossed the square, and came to the pharmacy. ⸻ He belonged to that great surgical school created by Bichat—that generation, now vanished, of philosopher-practitioners, who cherished their art with fanatical love and applied it with enthusiasm and sagacity. Everyone in his hospital trembled when he was angry; and his students so revered him that the moment they set up for themselves they imitated him as much as they could. There was scarcely a town in the district where one of them couldn’t be found, wearing a long merino overcoat and a full black tail coat, exactly like his. Doctor Larivière’s unbuttoned cuffs partly covered his fleshy hands—extraordinary hands, always ungloved, as though to be the readier to grapple with suffering. Disdainful of decorations, titles and academies, hospitable, generous, a father to the poor, practicing Christian virtues although an unbeliever, he might have been thought of as a saint if he hadn’t been feared as a devil because of the keenness of his mind. His scalpel-sharp glance cut deep into your soul, exposing any lie buried under excuses and reticences. His manner was majestic and genial, conscious as he was of his great gifts and his wealth and the forty years of hard work and blameless living he had behind him. ⸻ Homais paid his debt to his principles by likening priests to ravens: both are attracted by the odor of the dead. Actually, he had a more personal reason for disliking the sight of a priest: a cassock made him think of a shroud, and his execration of the one owed something to his fear of the other. Nevertheless, not flinching in the face of what he called his “mission,” he returned to the Bovary house along with Canivet, whom Monsieur Larivière had urged to stay on to the end. But for his wife’s protests, the pharmacist would have taken his two sons along, to inure them to life’s great moments, to provide them with a lesson, an example, a momentous spectacle that they would remember later. The bedroom, as they entered, was mournful and solemn. On the sewing table, now covered with a white napkin, were five or six small wads of cotton in a silver dish, and nearby a large crucifix between two lighted candelabra. Emma lay with her chin sunk on her breast, her eyelids unnaturally wide apart; and her poor hands picked at the sheets in the ghastly and poignant way of the dying, who seem impatient to cover themselves with their shrouds. Pale as a statue, his eyes red as coals, but no longer weeping, Charles stood facing her at the foot of the bed; the priest, on one knee, mumbled under his breath. She slowly turned her face, and seemed overjoyed at suddenly seeing the purple stole—doubtless recognizing, in this interval of extraordinary peace, the lost ecstasy of her first mystical flights and the first visions of eternal bliss. The priest stood up and took the crucifix; she stretched out her head like someone thirsting; and pressing her lips to the body of the God-Man, she imprinted on it, with every ounce of her failing strength, the most passionate love-kiss she had ever given. Then he recited the Miseratur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began the unctions. First he anointed her eyes, once so covetous of all earthly luxuries; then her nostrils, so gluttonous of caressing breezes and amorous scents; then her mouth, so prompt to lie, so defiant in pride, so loud in lust; then her hands, that had thrilled to voluptuous contacts; and finally the soles of her feet, once so swift when she had hastened to slake her desires, and now never to walk again. ⸻ The curé wiped his fingers, threw the oil-soaked bits of cotton into the fire, and returned to the dying woman, sitting beside her and telling her that now she must unite her sufferings with Christ’s and throw herself on the divine mercy. As he ended his exhortations he tried to have her grasp a blessed candle, symbol of the celestial glories soon to surround her. Emma was too weak, and couldn’t close her fingers: but for Monsieur Bournisien the candle would have fallen to the floor. Yet she was no longer so pale, and her face was serene, as though the sacrament had cured her. The priest didn’t fail to point this out: he even explained to Bovary that the Lord sometimes prolonged people’s lives when He judged it expedient for their salvation; and Charles remembered another day, when, similarly close to death, she had received communion. “Perhaps there’s hope after all,” he thought. And indeed, she looked all about her, slowly, like someone waking from a dream; then, in a distinct voice, she asked for her mirror, and she remained bowed over it for some time, until great tears flowed from her eyes. Then she threw back her head with a sigh, and sank onto the pillow. At once her breast began to heave rapidly. Her tongue hung at full length from her mouth; her rolling eyes grew dim like the globes of two lamps about to go out; and one might have thought her dead already but for the terrifying, ever-faster movement of her ribs, which were shaken by furious gasps, as though her soul were straining violently to break its fetters. Félicité knelt before the crucifix, and even the pharmacist flexed his knees a little. Monsieur Canivet stared vaguely out into the square. Bournisien had resumed his praying, his face bowed over the edge of the bed and his long black cassock trailing out behind him into the room. Charles was on the other side, on his knees, his arms stretched out toward Emma. He had taken her hands, and was pressing them, shuddering at every beat of her heart, as at the tremors of a falling ruin. As the death-rattle grew louder, the priest speeded his prayers: they mingled with Bovary’s stifled sobs, and at moments everything seemed drowned by the monotonous flow of Latin syllables that sounded like the tolling of a bell. ⸻ “People say that they scent the dead,” answered the priest. “It’s like bees: they leave the hive when someone dies.” Homais didn’t challenge those superstitions, for once again he had fallen asleep. Monsieur Bournisien, more resistant, continued for some time to move his lips in a murmur, then his chin sank gradually lower, his thick black book slipped from his hand, and he began to snore. They sat opposite one another, stomachs out, faces swollen, both of them scowling—united, after so much dissension, in the same human weakness; and they stirred no more than the corpse that was like another sleeper beside them. Charles’s coming didn’t wake them. This was the last time. He had come to bid her farewell. The aromatic herbs were still smoking, and at the window their swirls of bluish vapor mingled with the mist that was blowing in. There were a few stars. The night was mild. Great drops of wax were falling onto the bedsheets from the candles. Charles watched them burn, tiring his eyes in the gleam of their yellow flames. The watered satin of her dress was shimmering with the whiteness of moonbeams. Emma was invisible under it; and it seemed to him as though she were spreading out beyond herself, melting confusedly into the surroundings—the silence, the night, the passing wind, the damp fragrance that rose from the earth. ⸻ At the rear were the women, in their black cloaks with turned-down hoods; each of them carried a thick lighted candle; and Charles felt himself overcome amidst this endless succession of prayers and lights, these cloying odors of wax and cassocks. A cool breeze was blowing, the rye and the colza were sprouting green; dewdrops shimmered on the thorn hedges along the road. All kinds of joyous sounds filled the air—the rattle of a jolting cart in distant ruts, the repeated crowing of a cock, the thudding of a colt as it bolted off under the apple trees. The pure sky was dappled with rosy clouds; wisps of bluish smoke trailed down over the thatched cottages, their roofs abloom with iris. Charles recognized each farmyard as he passed. He remembered leaving them on mornings like this after making sick-calls, on his way back home to where she was. ⸻ She found him with his head leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth open; and there was a long lock of black hair in his hands. “Papa! Come along!” she said. She thought that he was playing, and gave him a little push. He fell to the ground. He was dead. Thirty-six hours later Monsieur Canivet arrived, summoned by the apothecary. He performed an autopsy, but found nothing. When everything was sold, there remained twelve francs and fifteen centimes—enough to pay Mademoiselle Bovary’s coach fare to her grandmother’s. The old lady died the same year; and since Monsieur Rouault was now paralyzed, it was an aunt who took charge of her. She is poor, and sends her to work for her living in a cotton mill. Since Bovary’s death, three doctors have succeeded one another in Yonville, and not one of them has gained a foothold, so rapidly and so utterly has Homais routed them. The devil himself doesn’t have a greater following than the pharmacist: the authorities treat him considerately, and public opinion is on his side. He has just been awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor. ⸻ sets up a play of unconscious drives in the text which threatens to split apart received social meanings. Eagleton intro kristeva “Insofar as empiricism is characteristic of British and American cultural traditions, emerging with such thinkers as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke and evident, as Easthope shows, not only in philosophical speculation but also in history, poetry, and literary journalism, it produces a distinctively anglocentric image of translation–commonsensical, pragmatic, ultimately anti‐ intellectual. Under scrutiny, its limitations become apparent. If it is valid, one must wonder why academics, publishers, and readers have not recognized translation as a valuable cultural practice by rewarding it at tenure‐ and‐ promotion considerations, issuing a steady stream of translated texts, and reading them with an informed appreciation of their status as second‐ order creations, as translations. One must wonder why as a rule academics fail to remark on the translations that they use in their research and teaching, going so far as to quote and comment on the translation as if it were the source text. Goldhammer is an extremely accomplished translator, but he cannot present an account of his work that illuminates it for his colleagues, his publishers, or his readers, and so he is powerless to remedy the continuing marginality of translation or to improve its effectiveness as an essential practice in cross‐ cultural exchange. Empiricism is a central problem here because it gives rise to a concept of language as direct expression or reference, leading to an instrumental model of translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, whether its form, its meaning, or its effect. In An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke assumed the instrumental model in describing translation as “chang[ ing] two words of the same signification one for the other” (3.4.9), where the “same signification” refers to a semantic invariant. Instrumentalism continues to guide a great deal of translation practice and research as well as translator training. It is the dominant understanding of translation everywhere today, even among scholars who look at their work as far removed from empiricism because deliberately or explicitly grounded in other theoretical discourses.” — Literary Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies) by Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan https://a.co/aymDQF9 An 18-year-old girl was at the back of a crowd which was being moved. She refused to move quickly and turned round to her side where the constable was walking and said, ‘Don’t push me, you . . . copper; I will report you.’ The prosecutor commented: ‘This is a case where in ordinary circumstances the police would shrug the thing off, but in an inflammable situation of this nature, silly little girls like this could cause a great deal of trouble.’ In one of the few cases that were actually dismissed in Hastings (August 1964) on the grounds of insufficient evidence, a boy, P.G., was charged with abusive behaviour. According to the evidence, a constable had seen a large group of ‘unruly youths’ walking along obstructing the road. Along with other officers, the constable moved one part of the group along the promenade. P.G. was one of the group and the constable heard him jeer at another officer and make personal observations including the remark, ‘Look at freckles.’ This sort of remark ‘might not have been taken much notice of in normal circumstances, but because of the inflammatory nature of the occasion, it assumed much greater proportions. Things could snowball very rapidly.’ The last two cases, together with personal observation of similar incidents, bear out Becker’s point that a great deal of enforcement activity is devoted not to the enforcement of the rules, but getting respect from the people the enforcer deals with: ‘This means that one may be labelled as a deviant, not because he has actually broken a rule, but because he has shown disrespect to the enforcer of the rule.’ 30 This factor assumed a particular significance at the seaside resorts, where police were hypersensitive to being exposed to public ridicule. In view of the audience watching their actions, this feeling was understandable. No matador wants to be laughed at. The more sustained effects of police action were less visible, but, in terms of the amplification model, as important. These effects were to increase the deviance by unwittingly solidifying the amorphous crowd forces into more viable groups for engaging in violence and by further polarizing the deviants against the community. These sorts of effects are well known to students of gang behaviour. The early Chicago sociologists – particularly Thrasher and Tannenbaum – documented the ways in which attack, opposition or attempted suppression increase the group’s cohesion.According to Thrasher, such attack was virtually a necessary prerequisite for any embryonic street group to become a gang. More recently, Yablonsky has shown the same effects and they have also been documented in the general literature on crowd control in political, racial and other types of disturbances. The crowd situation offers, par excellence, the opportunity for police intervention to have the unintended effect of solidifying the opposition. Such solidification and polarization takes place not simply in the face of attack, but attack that is perceived as harsh, indiscriminate and unfair. Even if the attack was not like this, the ambiguity of the crowd situation offered the maximum possible opportunity for rumours of such police action to spread. In the same way that the Mods and Rockers were perceived symbolically and stereotypically by the police, the police too were perceived by the crowd as the ‘enemy’. Here was a Punch and Judy show, with each side having a partially false perspective on the other and each acting in order to justify this perspective. It was not just a question, though, of a nexus of mutual misunderstandings; the police did objectively act in such a way as to increase solidification and polarization. Cohen folk devils “major contestive and festival forms of play are a form of civilization. His claim is particularly remarkable in terms of the long-standing puritanical rhetoric that holds play to be useless, even dangerous, to Christian culture. In a sense both the rhetoric of progress and his particular rhetoric of power share this inversion of that earlier Christian rhetoric. Huizinga’s position is that there is a morphological parallelism between playful contests and the actual contestive conduct of politics, the law, scholarship, and the arts. The forms of culture arise, he says, in such playful antitheses. From sports to crossword puzzles, people who are pitted against each other or who pit themselves against any obstacle in a way that requires skill can be at play or at work. Out of their desire to win or succeed, and the honor of so doing, they lift higher the aspirational levels of human society, even if their contests are to the death. From contest (power) comes the development of the social hierarchies (identity) around which the society constructs its values. “The point is for us that all these contests, even when fantastically depicted (in legend and story) as mortal and titanic combats with all their peculiarities still belong to the domain of play” (1955, p. 55). The playful contests themselves, Huizinga says, are in earlier societies woven into the mythical ritual patterns of the culture as a means to affect and determine the ripening of the crops, the smooth running of the season, and the prosperity of the whole year. “Every victory represents, that is, realizes for the victor, the triumph of the good powers over the bad, and at the same time the salvation of the group that effects it” (p. 56). “From the life of childhood right up to the highest achievements of civilization one of the strongest incentives to perfection, both individual and social, is the desire to be praised and honored for one’s excellence … Competition serves to give proof of superiority. This is particularly true of archaic society” (p. 63). Huizinga includes not only physical contests but also slanging matches, debates, boasts, gift giving (potlatches), parading of wealth, drinking contests, abusing and deriding adversaries, beauty contests, singing, riddling, keeping awake. All of these and many other playful contests arc the forms through which civilization rises and develops.” — The Ambiguity of Play by Brian Sutton-Smith https://a.co/1Vu2fKJ Here’s the transcription from the page you provided, followed by a Bloom’s Western Canon–based list ordered by thematic relevance to this excerpt. ⸻ DENISE SCOTT BROWN (see under “Masters of Postmodern Design” and “Living with Postmodern Design”), and colleague Steven Izenour, the book tapped into a new public consciousness and suggested that architects might learn something from the vernacular of the ordinary people upon whom they imposed their expertise. The book caused outrage among modernists. Ideology in its purest form, wrote the critic Kenneth Frampton. For architects and other liberals, Las Vegas was the ultimate expression of vulgar capitalism. But Learning from Las Vegas was not strictly “about” the values of Las Vegas at all. Indeed, the authors implored their readers to suspend moral judgment, and to some extent the book was actually a product of the counterculture. As a study of the new automobile-driven urbanism of the Strip and as the promotion of a way of revealing the order that underlay the apparent visual chaos of this new kind of city, its thinking (and the graphic styling) paralleled that of more acceptably avant-garde figures such as Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. However, whereas Venturi’s earlier Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture offered a subtle and challenging route toward an architecture of “the difficult whole,” in Learning from Las Vegas the authors introduced a concept that significantly influenced the architecture of the 1980s. They called it “the decorated shed.” The idea denoted an architecture of simple structures, decorated with signs, electronics, and ornamentation. Though perhaps a valid typology in the context of Las Vegas, it nevertheless gave architects license to splash skin-deep decorations over otherwise simple building types regardless of function or context. This approach was exemplified by Michael Graves’s Portland Building of 1982 in Oregon. This building, which graced the cover of the seminal The Language of Post-Modern Architecture by Charles Jencks, was essentially a modernist steel-frame building clad in a marble skin of flattened, pop-styled classicism. It became the model for many commercial developments over the next ten years, its decorative approach bringing some relief and gaiety after years of austere Miesian minimalism. But perhaps more than that, it constituted a relatively cost-effective way for developers to give otherwise mundane buildings a bit of razzmatazz. ⸻ Bloom’s Western Canon Titles Most Relevant to This Excerpt (Ordered by Thematic Relevance) This excerpt touches on themes of vernacular vs. elite culture, ornamentation vs. minimalism, irony, cultural legitimacy, and the dialectic between high art and popular taste. The following works from Harold Bloom’s canon resonate most strongly in that thematic field: 1. Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes A playful interrogation of high vs. low culture, illusion vs. reality, and the legitimacy of “popular” forms. 2. The Waste Land — T. S. Eliot A dense collage of cultural fragments, much like postmodern architecture’s appropriation and juxtaposition of disparate styles. 3. Ulysses — James Joyce Reconciles the epic tradition with the banalities of everyday life, akin to the “decorated shed” ethos. 4. The Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri An encyclopedic ordering of chaotic material into symbolic architecture. 5. Moby-Dick — Herman Melville Thematically rich in symbolic and literal structures, balancing the functional and the ornamental. 6. Middlemarch — George Eliot Interweaves societal structures, personal ambitions, and aesthetic ideals—like the negotiation between minimalism and decoration. 7. Great Expectations — Charles Dickens Addresses class aspiration, style, and surface display, paralleling debates about architectural ornament. 8. The Faerie Queene — Edmund Spenser Highly ornamental allegory, the Renaissance version of an elaborate “decorated shed.” 9. The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer Mixes high literary form with earthy popular storytelling, much like postmodernism’s eclectic borrowings. 10. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen Satirizes manners and surfaces while revealing the structures beneath social façades. 11. Bleak House — Charles Dickens A critique of sprawling bureaucratic structures, resonant with critiques of modernist planning. 12. Paradise Lost — John Milton Grand architecture of verse, concerned with cosmic order and moral ornamentation. 13. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez Magical realism’s layering of myth and history mirrors postmodern layering of architectural forms. 14. Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison Engages questions of visibility, surface, and the hidden structures of society. 15. Hamlet — William Shakespeare Theatricality, performance, and “sets” as architecture for human action. 16. King Lear — William Shakespeare A dismantling of hierarchical order, akin to postmodernism’s subversion of modernist dogma. 17. Othello — William Shakespeare Appearance vs. reality, ornament vs. structure, deception and revelation. 18. Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman A vernacular epic that celebrates common life—paralleling Venturi and Scott Brown’s embrace of the ordinary. 19. The Tempest — William Shakespeare A theatrical space of illusion, artifice, and constructed experience. 20. The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs (not Bloom’s canon, but thematically central here) ⸻ If you want, I can next map specific architectural concepts from Venturi, Scott Brown, and Jencks directly onto plot and structural devices in the top 5 works above—which could make a killer cross-disciplinary reading plan to accompany Postmodern Design Complete. Would you like me to do that? “I am sorry my husband is not at home.” “Are you?” “I perceive I have said that in mere convention! Honestly I don’t think I am sorry. It does not matter, either way, sad to say!” As they had overdone the grasp of hands some time sooner, she touched his fingers but lightly when he went out now. He had hardly gone from the door when, with a dissatisfied look, she jumped on a form and opened the iron casement of a window beneath which he was passing in the path without. “When do you leave here to catch your train, Jude?” she asked. He looked up in some surprise. “The coach that runs to meet it goes in three-quarters of an hour or so.” “What will you do with yourself for the time?” “Oh—wander about, I suppose. Perhaps I shall go and sit in the old church.” “It does seem hard of me to pack you off so! You have thought enough of churches, Heaven knows, without going into one in the dark. Stay there.” “Where?” “Where you are. I can talk to you better like this than when you were inside… It was so kind and tender of you to give up half a day’s work to come to see me! … You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet!” Now that the high window-sill was between them, so that he could not get at her, she seemed not to mind indulging in a frankness she had feared at close quarters. “I have been thinking,” she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, “that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies… Now you mustn’t wait longer, or you will lose the coach. Come and see me again. You must come to the house then.”” — Jude the Obscure (with an Introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel) by Thomas Hardy https://a.co/7ONLjJs “In any case, I have a good memory. I can recall every word of what I read. My memory is such that I used to win prizes in school because of my ability to remember names and dates, inventions, battles, treaties, alliances, and the like. I always scored highest on factual tests, and in later years, in the “real world,” as it’s called, my memory stood me in good stead. For instance, if I were asked right now to give the details of the Council of Trent or the Treaty of Utrecht, or to talk about Carthage, that city razed by the Romans after Hannibal’s defeat (the Roman soldiers plowed salt into the ground so that Carthage could never be called Carthage again), I could do so. If called upon to talk about the Seven Years’ War, the Thirty Years’, or the Hundred Years’ War, or simply the First Silesian War, I could hold forth with the greatest enthusiasm and confidence. Ask me anything about the Tartars, the Renaissance popes, or the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. Thermopylae, Shiloh, or the Maxim gun. Easy. Tannenberg? Simple as blackbird pie. The famous four and twenty that were set before the king. At Agincourt, English longbows carried the day. And here’s something else. Everyone has heard of the Battle of Lepanto, the last great sea battle fought in ships powered by galley slaves. This fracas took place in 1571 in the eastern Mediterranean, when the combined naval forces of the Christian nations of Europe turned back the Arab hordes under the infamous Ali Muezzin Zade, a man who was fond of personally cutting off the noses of his prisoners before calling in the executioners. But does anyone remember that Cervantes was involved in this affair and had his left hand lopped off in the battle? Something else. The combined French and Russian losses in one day at Borodino were seventy-five thousand men—the equivalent in fatalities of a fully loaded jumbo jet crashing every three minutes from breakfast to sundown. Kutuzov pulled his forces back toward Moscow. Napoleon drew breath, marshaled his troops, and continued his advance. He entered the downtown area of Moscow, where he stayed for a month waiting for Kutuzov, who never showed his face again. The Russian generalissimo was waiting for snow and ice, for Napoleon to begin his retreat to France.” — Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) by Raymond Carver https://a.co/02dFSUy “IN CONTEXT Focus Spain’s Golden Century Before 1499 The story of a procuress told in a series of dialogues, La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas, marks the beginning of a literary renaissance in Spain. 1554 The anonymously published novella The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities invents a new form—the picaresque. After 1609 Lope de Vega, Spain’s most prolific playwright and a major poet, publishes his artistic manifesto New Rules for Writing Plays at this Time to justify his writing style. 1635 Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s philosophical allegory Life is a Dream is one of the Golden Century’s most widely translated works. Straddling the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain’s Golden Century refers to an extraordinary flourishing of the arts that began with the nation’s rise to superpower status via the wealth of its colonies in America. Under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (reigned 1519–56), there was a free flow of ideas across Europe, with Spain’s writers responding to the excitement of the Renaissance. New techniques in storytelling, verse, and drama produced defining prose, poetry, and plays. The anonymously authored Lazarillo de Tormes featured a picaro (young rascal) narrator of mixed fortunes, giving the world a new literary genre—the picaresque novel. Experimentation with verse forms as well as meter characterized the work of poet Garcilaso de la Vega. And the dramatist Lope de Vega produced a vast and dazzling oeuvre of 1,800 plays—rich in character, plot, and history—together with sonnets, novellas, and lyric poetry. In the same period, Miguel de Cervantes produced Don Quixote (originally titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote), the defining literary achievement of the Golden Century. Like Lope de Vega, he was writing near the end of an era, as Spain began to decline due to a combination of despotic rule, religious fanaticism, and dwindling fortunes after the English defeat of the Armada. Out of this climate of flux leapt Don Quixote, an eccentric hero who bestrides a romantic past and an unstable present in a chivalric adventure that continues to enchant and inspire. Engagement with reality Just as the plays of Cervantes’ contemporary William Shakespeare are at the origin of modern drama, so Don Quixote is at the origin of modern fiction. Both writers delved into the motivations, actions, and emotions of their protagonists in a way that had not been attempted before, lending such characters as Hamlet, Macbeth, and Don Quixote a psychological complexity that made them seem real. Don Quixote engages with reality on two main levels. The main character of Cervantes’ novel is enthralled by the knightly heroes of earlier chivalric romances, and renames himself “Don Quixote” in imitation of them. Yet unlike these romantic heroes, the characters of Don Quixote worry about everyday concerns, such as food and sleep. They travel through a world of taverns and windmills, along fairly nondescript roads and paths. The characters occupy an ordinary setting that resembles our world. On another level of engagement, the novel also operates according to the literary approach known as “realism”: everything happens within the unities of time and place (the action in the book is contemporary with the time it was written, it adheres to a specific geographical region, and is broadly chronological), without magical or mythical intervention. Giants of the imagination Despite this realism, illusion has its place in the novel—but only in the mind of its central character. Don Quixote’s encounters with innkeepers, prostitutes, goatherds, soldiers, priests, escaped convicts, and scorned lovers are magnified by his imagination into the kind of chivalrous quests that might be undertaken by the knight Amadis of Gaul, in the romances that bear his name. Donning his rusty armor, mounting the ancient horse he renames Rocinante, and enlisting the simple laborer Sancho Panza as his “squire,” Don Quixote—in the best tradition of chivalric romances—announces his love for the peasant girl he calls Dulcinea. In his realm of fantasy the everyday is transformed into the extraordinary, the lasting symbol of which are the windmills of La Mancha, elevated by his imagination into fearsome enemies, with whom he sees fit to engage in combat. Further complexity The gap between reality and illusion is the source of the book’s comedy (and no less its tragedy), and is a theme that has nourished fiction across the world in the subsequent four centuries. Yet, having established his theme, Cervantes deepens and complicates it in the second part of his novel, which was published 10 years after the first part. In Cervantes’ Part Two, the characters—including Don Quixote himself—have read, or at least heard of, the first part of the novel in which they appear. When strangers encounter Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in person, they already know their famous history. A duke and duchess, for example, are excited when they meet Don Quixote, having read all about his adventures. They think it amusing to deceive him for entertainment, setting in play a string of imagined adventures, which result in a series of sadistic practical jokes. Honor—Cervantes suggests—clearly has nothing to do with social position. Readers begin to laugh less. While Cervantes was writing Part Two, a spurious Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by the Licenciado Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, of Tordesillas appeared. Cervantes’ literary creation had been stolen, inciting his comment, at the end of Part Two: “For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine to write.” In literary revenge, Cervantes sends his knight and squire off to Barcelona, to kidnap a character from the Avellaneda book. "Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind." Don Quixote In the second part of Don Quixote, Cervantes himself appears as a character, and other versions of Quixote are introduced. Reality is reflected by these various mirrors, deliberately confusing life and literature. Stories within stories Literature is itself also a theme in the novel. We are told that Don Quixote’s delusions result from reading too much—an interesting proposition to present to a reader of Don Quixote. But even when Don Quixote’s books are burned by the priest, housekeeper, and barber, his improbable quest for glory continues. The role of the book’s narrator is also questioned. Far from disappearing behind his characters and story, Cervantes makes frequent appearances, ostensibly in his own voice or often in the guise of a narrator called Cide Hamete Benengeli, a Moorish storyteller. The first words of the novel—“ In some village in La Mancha, whose name I do not care to recall”—exhibit the narrator’s willfulness as well as the author’s control over his material. The novel is written in episodic form, laying the groundwork for the many road novels and films that would follow. Most of the characters whom Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encounter have a story to tell, providing the novel with a format familiar to readers of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron, and of the canon of tales from the East that entered southern Spain in the long centuries of Arab rule. For example, one of the novel’s minor characters, Ricote, a Morisco (a Muslim forcibly converted to Christianity), recounts his exile from Spain—a story within a story that introduces historical facts to the fictional narrative. The expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 was highly topical, and whereas the earlier romances of chivalry dwelled in a world of myth, Cervantes’ novel was ready to engage with gritty, present-day issues. Illusion and disillusion Stories proliferate at every turn, offering further opportunities for illusion and disillusion. Quixote and Sancho hear of a young man who became a shepherd after having studied pastoral literature, but died for the love of a beautiful shepherdess, Marcella. Accused of being the cause of his death, Marcella delivers a fiery speech at the funeral defending her right to live as she wants and refusing to be the object of male fantasy. Literature is seemingly condemned for its capacity to encourage its readers to live in a dream world, while the book achieves precisely this goal. Cervantes makes clear that as an author he will do exactly what he wants. Slowly, Don Quixote is brought back home, exhausted and disenchanted. “I was mad, now I am in my senses,” he says, shortly before his death. By killing him off, Cervantes clearly wanted to prevent any more unauthorized sequels. Despite Cervantes’ claims of ownership, Don Quixote illustrates the way great fictional characters ultimately escape their authors, seeming to move away from the pages in which they first appear. He inspired English comic novelists such as Henry Fielding and French realists such as Gustave Flaubert, whose character Emma Bovary can be seen as a 19th-century Quixote in her bid to escape the tedium of life by imitating fiction. In the 20th century, Cervantes’ playful and metafictional side inspired Jorge Luis Borges to write “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (about a writer who recreates Cervantes’ novel), which Borges described, mischievously, as “more subtle than Cervantes’ [story].” Don Quixote is also immortalized as an English adjective for erratic if idealistic behavior—quixotic. "‘ Tell me, Senor Don Alvaro,’ said Don Quixote, ‘am I at all like that Don Quixote you talk of?’" Don Quixote Interpretations Standing at the junction between medieval chivalric tales and the modern novel, Don Quixote bequeathed a rich cultural legacy to generations of readers, and the work has been subject to shifting interpretations over the centuries. Upon publication in Spain’s Golden Century, it was widely perceived as a satire—with Don Quixote as the butt of the jokes; but with much of Spain’s history woven into the tale, it was also seen as a critique of the country’s imperial ambitions. Don Quixote’s delusions of heroism can be read as a symbol of his nation’s wasteful expansionism in the face of decline. For revolutionaries, Don Quixote was an inspiration—a man who was right when the system was wrong; and the Romantics transformed him into a tragic character—a man with noble intentions, defeated by the second rate. This reevaluation of the work over time points to the enduring power of its story and its writing, and guarantees the text a central place in literary history. La Mancha in central Spain is a dry but agriculturally important area, lacking in literary resonance and therefore an unlikely (and amusing) home for a would-be chivalric hero. MIGUEL DE CERVANTES Miguel de Cervantes was born near Madrid, Spain, in 1547. His mother was the daughter of a nobleman, his father was a medical practitioner. Little is known of Cervantes’ early life, but it is likely that he lived and worked in Rome around 1569, before enlisting in the Spanish Navy. Badly wounded in the Battle of Lepanto (in which an alliance of southern European Catholic states defeated Ottoman forces), he was captured by the Turks in 1575 and spent five years in prison in Algiers; his ransom was paid by a Catholic religious order, and he returned to Madrid. Cervantes’ first major work, La Galatea, was published in 1585. He struggled financially but kept writing, finding success (though not wealth) with Don Quixote. He died in 1616, in Madrid, but his coffin was later lost. In 2015, scientists claimed to have unearthed his remains in a convent in Madrid. Other key works 1613 Exemplary Novels 1617 Persiles and Sigismunda (unfinished) See also: The Canterbury Tales • First Folio • The Decameron • Amadis of Gaul • The Tin Drum • Hopscotch • If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” — The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained (DK Big Ideas) by DK https://a.co/51JHaCK

Nine editions of the First Part of “Don Quixote” had already appeared before Cervantes died, thirty thousand copies in all, according to his own estimate, and a tenth was printed at Barcelona the year after his death. So large a number naturally supplied the demand for some time, but by 1634 it appears to have been exhausted; and from that time down to the present day the stream of editions has continued to flow rapidly and regularly.

But it is, after all, the humour of “Don Quixote” that distinguishes it from all other books of the romance kind. It is this that makes it, as one of the most judicial-minded of modern critics calls it, “the best novel in the world beyond all comparison.” It is its varied humour, ranging from broad farce to comedy as subtle as Shakespeare’s or Moliere’s that has naturalised it in every country where there are readers, and made it a classic in every language that has a literature.

URGANDA THE UNKNOWN To the book of Don Quixote of la Mancha If to be welcomed by the good, O Book! thou make thy steady aim, No empty chatterer will dare To question or dispute thy claim. But if perchance thou hast a mind To win of idiots approbation, Lost labour will be thy reward, Though they’ll pretend appreciation. They say a goodly shade he finds Who shelters ‘neath a goodly tree; And such a one thy kindly star In Bejar bath provided thee: A royal tree whose spreading boughs A show of princely fruit display; A tree that bears a noble Duke, The Alexander of his day. Of a Manchegan gentleman Thy purpose is to tell the story, Relating how he lost his wits O’er idle tales of love and glory, Of “ladies, arms, and cavaliers:” A new Orlando Furioso — Innamorato, rather — who Won Dulcinea del Toboso. Put no vain emblems on thy shield; All figures — that is bragging play. A modest dedication make, And give no scoffer room to say, “What! Alvaro de Luna here? Or is it Hannibal again? Or does King Francis at Madrid Once more of destiny complain?” Since Heaven it hath not pleased on thee Deep erudition to bestow, Or black Latino’s gift of tongues, No Latin let thy pages show. Ape not philosophy or wit, Lest one who cannot comprehend, Make a wry face at thee and ask, “Why offer flowers to me, my friend?” Be not a meddler; no affair Of thine the life thy neighbours lead: Be prudent; oft the random jest Recoils upon the jester’s head. Thy constant labour let it be To earn thyself an ...

R. He is an ass, will die an ass, an ass was born;

myself, through my shallowness and want of learning, unequal to supplying them, and because I am by nature shy and careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself can say without them. Hence the cogitation and abstraction you found me in, and reason enough, what you have heard from me.” Hearing this, my friend, giving himself a slap on the forehead and breaking into a hearty laugh, exclaimed, “Before God, Brother, now am I disabused of an error in which I have been living all this long time I have known you, all through which I have taken you to be shrewd and sensible in all you do; but now I see you are as far from that as the heaven is from the earth. It is possible that things of so little moment and so easy to set right can occupy and perplex a ripe wit like yours, fit to break through and crush far greater obstacles? By my faith, this comes, not of any want of ability, but of too much indolence and too little knowledge of life. Do you want to know if I am telling the truth? Well, then, attend to me, and you will see how, in the opening and shutting of an eye, I sweep away all your difficulties, and supply all those deficiencies which you say check and discourage you from bringing before the world the story of your famous Don Quixote, the light and mirror of all knight-errantry.” “Say on,” said I, listening to his talk; “how do you propose to make up for my diffidence, and reduce to order this chaos of perplexity I am in?” To which he made answer, “Your first d...

So he told him he was quite right in pursuing the object he had in view, and that such a motive was natural and becoming in cavaliers as distinguished as he seemed and his gallant bearing showed him to be; and that he himself in his younger days had followed the same honourable calling, roaming in quest of adventures in various parts of the world, among others the Curing-grounds of Malaga, the Isles of Riaran, the Precinct of Seville, the Little Market of Segovia, the Olivera of Valencia, the Rondilla of Granada, the Strand of San Lucar, the Colt of Cordova, the Taverns of Toledo, and divers other quarters, where he had proved the nimbleness of his feet and the lightness of his fingers, doing many wrongs, cheating many widows, ruining maids and swindling minors, and, in short, bringing himself under the notice of almost every tribunal and court of justice in Spain; until at last he had retired to this castle of his, where he was living upon his property and upon that of others; and where he received all knights-errant of whatever rank or condition they might be, all for the great love he bore them and that they might share their substance with him in return for his benevolence.

The landlord told all the people who were in the inn about the craze of his guest, the watching of the armour, and the dubbing ceremony he contemplated. Full of wonder at so strange a form of madness, they flocked to see it from a distance, and observed with what composure he sometimes paced up and down, or sometimes, leaning on his lance, gazed on his armour without taking his eyes off it for ever so long; and as the night closed in with a light from the moon so brilliant that it might vie with his that lent it, everything the novice knight did was plainly seen by all.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Shortly after this, another, not knowing what had happened (for the carrier still lay senseless), came with the same object of giving water to his mules, and was proceeding to remove the armour in order to clear the trough, when Don Quixote, without uttering a word or imploring aid from anyone, once more dropped his buckler and once more lifted his lance, and without actually breaking the second carrier’s head into pieces, made more than three of it, for he laid it open in four. At the noise all the people of the inn ran to the spot, and among them the landlord. Seeing this, Don Quixote braced his buckler on his arm, and with his hand on his sword exclaimed, “O Lady of Beauty, strength and support of my faint heart, it is time for thee to turn the eyes of thy greatness on this thy captive knight on the brink of so mighty an adventure.” By this he felt himself so inspired that he would not have flinched if all the carriers in the world had assailed him. The comrades of the wounded perceiving the plight they were in began from a distance to shower stones on Don Quixote, who screened himself as best he could with his buckler, not daring to quit the trough and leave his armour unprotected. The landlord shouted to them to leave him alone, for he had already told them that he was mad, and as a madman he would not be accountable even if he killed them all. Still louder shouted Don Quixote, calling them knaves and traitors,

send for the wise Urganda to cure and see to my wounds.”

“See there! plague on it!” cried the housekeeper at this: “did not my heart tell the truth as to which foot my master went lame of? To bed with your worship at once, and we will contrive to cure you here without fetching that Hurgada. A curse I say once more, and a hundred times more, on those books of chivalry that have brought your worship to such a pass.”

Fire 🔥 !

The simplicity of the housekeeper made the licentiate laugh, and he directed the barber to give him the books one by one to see what they were about, as there might be some to be found among them that did not deserve the penalty of fire. “No,” said the niece, “there is no reason for showing mercy to any of them; they have every one of them done mischief; better fling them out of the window into the court and make a pile of them and set fire to them; or else carry them into the yard, and there a bonfire can be made without the smoke giving any annoyance.”

“The ‘Galatea’ of Miguel de Cervantes,” said the barber. “That Cervantes has been for many years a great friend of mine, and to my knowledge he has had more experience in reverses than in verses. His book has some good invention in it, it presents us with something but brings nothing to a conclusion: we must wait for the Second Part it promises: perhaps with amendment it may succeed in winning the full measure of grace that is now denied it; and in the mean time do you, senor gossip, keep it shut up in your own quarters.”

Of the Good Fortune which the Valiant Don Quixote had in the Terrible and Undreamt-of Adventure of the Windmills, with Other Occurrences Worthy to Be Fitly Recorded At this point they came in sight of thirty forty windmills that there are on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, “Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.” “What giants?” said Sancho Panza. “Those thou seest there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.” “Look, your worship,” said Sancho; “what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.” “It is easy to see,” replied Don Quixote, “that thou art not used to this business of adventures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat.” So saying, he gave the spur to his steed Rocinante, heedless of the cries his squire Sancho sent after him, warning him that most certainly they were windmills and not giants he was going to attack. He, h...

### Haiku: Windmills on the plain, Giants in Quixote's mind—charge, But wind sweeps him down. --- ### Limerick: There once was a knight, full of might, Who saw giants where windmills took flight. He charged with his lance, But failed in his stance, And Rocinante fell from the fight. --- ### Petrarchan Sonnet: Upon the plain where windmills turned with grace, Brave Quixote saw great giants rise to war. His squire, Sancho, warned with cries implore, Yet madness veiled the truth before his face. With lance in hand, he spurred to meet the chase, And into battle charged with fervent roar, But wind and sail conspired to topple more, And down he fell, defeated by his race. Yet still he blamed the hand of fate’s cruel sage, That tricked his mind and stole his righteous fight. In foolish pride, he vowed to find again, Another foe, to conquer in his rage. But Sancho knew, with truth in simple sight, 'Twas wind, not war, that sent them to their end. Chat gpt

On, then, as aforesaid, came Don Quixote against the wary Biscayan, with uplifted sword and a firm intention of splitting him in half, while on his side the Biscayan waited for him sword in hand, and under the protection of his cushion; and all present stood trembling, waiting in suspense the result of blows such as threatened to fall, and the lady in the coach and the rest of her following were making a thousand vows and offerings to all the images and shrines of Spain, that God might deliver her squire and all of them from this great peril in which they found themselves. But it spoils all, that at this point and crisis the author of the history leaves this battle impending, giving as excuse that he could find nothing more written about these achievements of Don Quixote than what has been already set forth. It is true the second author of this work was unwilling to believe that a history so curious could have been allowed to fall under the sentence of oblivion, or that the wits of La Mancha could have been so undiscerning as not to preserve in their archives or registries some documents referring to this famous knight; and this being his persuasion, he did not despair of finding the conclusion of this pleasant history, which, heaven favouring him, he did find in a way that shall be related in the Second Part.

And so I could not bring myself to believe that such a gallant tale had been left maimed and mutilated, and I laid the blame on Time, the devourer and destroyer of all things, that had either concealed or consumed it.

And this is my own opinion; for, where he could and should give freedom to his pen in praise of so worthy a knight, he seems to me deliberately to pass it over in silence; which is ill done and worse contrived, for it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make them swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future. In

And though it is plain they could not do without eating and performing all the other natural functions, because, in fact, they were men like ourselves, it is plain too that, wandering as they did the most part of their lives through woods and wilds and without a cook, their most usual fare would be rustic viands such as those thou now offer me; so that, friend Sancho, let not that distress thee which pleases me, and do not seek to make a new world or pervert knight-errantry.”

Don Quixote, who desired nothing better, rose and ordered Sancho to saddle and pannel at once, which he did with all despatch, and with the same they all set out forthwith. They had not gone a quarter of a league when at the meeting of two paths they saw coming towards them some six shepherds dressed in black sheepskins and with their heads crowned with garlands of cypress and bitter oleander. Each of them carried a stout holly staff in his hand, and along with them there came two men of quality on horseback in handsome travelling dress, with three servants on foot accompanying them. Courteous salutations were exchanged on meeting, and inquiring one of the other which way each party was going, they learned that all were bound for the scene of the burial, so they went on all together.

annals and histories of England, in which are recorded the famous deeds of King Arthur, whom we in our popular Castilian invariably call King Artus, with regard to whom it is an ancient tradition, and commonly received all over that kingdom of Great Britain, that this king did not die, but was changed by magic art into a raven, and that in process of time he is to return to reign and recover his kingdom and sceptre; for which reason it cannot be proved that from that time to this any Englishman ever killed a raven? Well, then, in the time of this good king that famous order of chivalry of the Knights of the Round Table was instituted, and the amour of Don Lancelot of the Lake with the Queen Guinevere occurred, precisely as is there related, the go-between and confidante therein being the highly honourable dame Quintanona, whence came that ballad so well known and widely spread in our Spain — O never surely was there knight So served by hand of dame, As served was he Sir Lancelot hight When he from Britain came — with all the sweet and delectable course of his achievements in love and war.

one solitary swallow does not make summer;

The horrid hissing of the scaly snake, The awesome cries of monsters yet unnamed, The crow’s ill-boding croak, the hollow moan Of wild winds wrestling with the restless sea, The wrathful bellow of the vanquished bull, The plaintive sobbing of the widowed dove, The envied owl’s sad note, the wail of woe That rises from the dreary choir of Hell, Commingled in one sound, confusing sense, Let all these come to aid my soul’s complaint, For pain like mine demands new modes of song. No echoes of that discord shall be heard Where Father Tagus rolls, or on the banks Of olive-bordered Betis; to the rocks Or in deep caverns shall my plaint be told, And by a lifeless tongue in living words; Or in dark valleys or on lonely shores, Where neither foot of man nor sunbeam falls; Or in among the poison-breathing swarms Of monsters nourished by the sluggish Nile. For, though it be to solitudes remote The hoarse vague echoes of my sorrows sound Thy matchless cruelty, my dismal fate Shall carry them to all the spacious world.

Disdain hath power to kill, and patience dies Slain by suspicion, be it false or true; And deadly is the force of jealousy; Long absence makes of life a dreary void; No hope of happiness can give repose To him that ever fears to be forgot; And death, inevitable, waits in hall. But I, by some strange miracle, live on A prey to absence, jealousy, disdain; Racked by suspicion as by certainty; Forgotten, left to feed my flame alone.

And while I suffer thus, there comes no ray Of hope to gladden me athwart the gloom; Nor do I look for it in my despair; But rather clinging to a cureless woe, All hope do I abjure for evermore. Can there be hope where fear is? Were it well, When far more certain are the grounds of fear? Ought I to shut mine eyes to jealousy, If through a thousand heart-wounds it appears? Who would not give free access to distrust, Seeing disdain unveiled, and — bitter change! — All his suspicions turned to certainties, And the fair truth transformed into a lie? Oh, thou fierce tyrant of the realms of love, Oh, Jealousy! put chains upon these hands, And bind me with thy strongest cord, Disdain. But, woe is me! triumphant over all, My sufferings drown the memory of you. And now I die, and since there is no hope Of happiness for me in life or death, Still to my fantasy I’ll fondly cling. I’ll say that he is wise who loveth well, And that the soul most free is that most bound In thraldom to the ancient tyrant Love. I’ll say that she who is mine enemy In that fair body hath as fair a mind, And that her coldness is but my desert, And that by virtue of the pain be sends Love rules his kingdom with a g...

the instant Ambrosio saw her he addressed her, with manifest indignation: “Art thou come, by chance, cruel basilisk of these mountains, to see if in thy presence blood will flow from the wounds of this wretched being thy cruelty has robbed of life; or is it to exult over the cruel work of thy humours that thou art come; or like another pitiless Nero to look down from that height upon the ruin of his Rome in embers; or in thy arrogance to trample on this ill-fated corpse, as the ungrateful daughter trampled on her father Tarquin’s? Tell us quickly for what thou art come, or what it is thou wouldst have, for, as I know the thoughts of Chrysostom never failed to obey thee in life, I will make all these who call themselves his friends obey thee, though he be dead.”

it is very absurd to say, “I love thee because thou art beautiful, thou must love me though I be ugly.” But supposing the beauty equal on both sides, it does not follow that the inclinations must be therefore alike, for it is not every beauty that excites love, some but pleasing the eye without winning the affection; and if every sort of beauty excited love and won the heart, the will would wander vaguely to and fro unable to make choice of any; for as there is an infinity of beautiful objects there must be an infinity of inclinations, and true love, I have heard it said, is indivisible, and must be voluntary and not compelled. If this be so, as I believe it to be, why do you desire me to bend my will by force, for no other reason but that you say you love me? Nay — tell me — had Heaven made me ugly, as it has made me beautiful, could I with justice complain of you for not loving me? Moreover, you must remember that the beauty I possess was no choice of mine, for, be it what it may, Heaven of its bounty gave it me without my asking or choosing it; and as the viper, though it kills with it, does not deserve to be blamed for the poison it carries, as it is a gift of nature, neither do I deserve reproach for being beautiful; for beauty in a modest woman is like fire at a distance or a sharp sword; the one does not burn, the other does not cut, those who do not come too near. Honour and virtue are the ornaments of the mind, without which the body, though it be so, has no right...

Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them. If Chrysostom’s impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others;

But Sancho did not so fully approve of his master’s admonition as to let it pass without saying in reply, “Senor, I am a man of peace, meek and quiet, and I can put up with any affront because I have a wife and children to support and bring up; so let it be likewise a hint to your worship, as it cannot be a mandate, that on no account will I draw sword either against clown or against knight, and that here before God I forgive the insults that have been offered me, whether they have been, are, or shall be offered me by high or low, rich or poor, noble or commoner, not excepting any rank or condition whatsoever.”

To which Don Quixote replied, “Wounds received in battle confer honour instead of taking it away; and so, friend Panza, say no more, but, as I told thee before, get up as well as thou canst and put me on top of thy beast in whatever fashion pleases thee best, and let us go hence ere night come on and surprise us in these wilds.”

While he was taken up with these vagaries, then, the time and the hour — an unlucky one for him — arrived for the Asturian to come, who in her smock, with bare feet and her hair gathered into a fustian coif, with noiseless and cautious steps entered the chamber where the three were quartered, in quest of the carrier; but scarcely had she gained the door when Don Quixote perceived her, and sitting up in his bed in spite of his plasters and the pain of his ribs, he stretched out his arms to receive his beauteous damsel. The Asturian, who went all doubled up and in silence with her hands before her feeling for her lover, encountered the arms of Don Quixote, who grasped her tightly by the wrist, and drawing her towards him, while she dared not utter a word, made her sit down on the bed. He then felt her smock, and although it was of sackcloth it appeared to him to be of the finest and softest silk: on her wrists she wore some glass beads, but to him they had the sheen of precious Orient pearls: her hair, which in some measure resembled a horse’s mane, he rated as threads of the brightest gold of Araby, whose refulgence dimmed the sun himself: her breath, which no doubt smelt of yesterday’s stale salad, seemed to him to diffuse a sweet aromatic fragrance from her mouth; and, in short, he drew her portrait in his imagination with the same features and in the same style as that which he had seen in his books of the other princesses who, smitten by love, came with all the adornmen...

The cries of the poor blanketed wretch were so loud that they reached the ears of his master, who, halting to listen attentively, was persuaded that some new adventure was coming, until he clearly perceived that it was his squire who uttered them.

“The fear thou art in, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “prevents thee from seeing or hearing correctly, for one of the effects of fear is to derange the senses and make things appear different from what they are; if thou art in such fear, withdraw to one side and leave me to myself, for alone I suffice to bring victory to that side to which I shall give my aid;”

“For all that,” answered Don Quixote, “I would rather have just now a quarter of bread, or a loaf and a couple of pilchards’ heads, than all the herbs described by Dioscorides, even with Doctor Laguna’s notes. Nevertheless, Sancho the Good, mount thy beast and come along with me, for God, who provides for all things, will not fail us (more especially when we are so active in his service as we are), since he fails not the midges of the air, nor the grubs of the earth, nor the tadpoles of the water, and is so merciful that he maketh his sun to rise on the good and on the evil, and sendeth rain on the unjust and on the just.” “Your worship would make a better preacher than knight-errant,” said Sancho. “Knights-errant knew and ought to know everything, Sancho,” said Don Quixote; “for there were knights-errant in former times as well qualified to deliver a sermon or discourse in the middle of an encampment, as if they had graduated in the University of Paris; whereby we may see that the lance has never blunted the pen, nor the pen the lance.” “Well, be it as your worship says,” replied Sancho; “let us be off now and find some place of shelter for the night, and God grant it may be somewhere where there are no blankets, nor blanketeers, nor phantoms, nor enchanted Moors; for if there are, may the devil take the whole concern.”

But Don Quixote, supported by his intrepid heart, leaped on Rocinante, and bracing his buckler on his arm, brought his pike to the slope, and said, “Friend Sancho, know that I by Heaven’s will have been born in this our iron age to revive in it the age of gold, or the golden as it is called; I am he for whom perils, mighty achievements, and valiant deeds are reserved; I am, I say again, he who is to revive the Knights of the Round Table, the Twelve of France and the Nine Worthies; and he who is to consign to oblivion the Platirs, the Tablantes, the Olivantes and Tirantes, the Phoebuses and Belianises, with the whole herd of famous knights-errant of days gone by, performing in these in which I live such exploits, marvels, and feats of arms as shall obscure their brightest deeds.

“That is the natural way of women,” said Don Quixote, “to scorn the one that loves them, and love the one that hates them: go on, Sancho.” “It came to pass,” said Sancho, “that the shepherd carried out his intention, and driving his goats before him took his way across the plains of Estremadura to pass over into the Kingdom of Portugal. Torralva, who knew of it, went after him, and on foot and barefoot followed him at a distance, with a pilgrim’s staff in her hand and a scrip round her neck, in which she carried, it is said, a bit of looking-glass and a piece of a comb and some little pot or other of paint for her face; but let her carry what she did, I am not going to trouble myself to prove it; all I say is, that the shepherd, they say, came with his flock to cross over the river Guadiana, which was at that time swollen and almost overflowing its banks, and at the spot he came to there was neither ferry nor boat nor anyone to carry him or his flock to the other side, at which he was much vexed, for he perceived that Torralva was approaching and would give him great annoyance with her tears and entreaties; however, he went looking about so closely that he discovered a fisherman who had alongside of him a boat so small that it could only hold one person and one goat; but for all that he spoke to him and agreed with him to carry himself and his three hundred goats across. The fisherman got into the boat and carried one goat over; he came back and carried another over; he ca...

but so great was the fear that had penetrated his heart, he dared not separate himself from his master by as much as the black of his nail;

“Thou speakest not amiss, Sancho,” answered Don Quixote, “but before that point is reached it is requisite to roam the world, as it were on probation, seeking adventures, in order that, by achieving some, name and fame may be acquired, such that when he betakes himself to the court of some great monarch the knight may be already known by his deeds, and that the boys, the instant they see him enter the gate of the city, may all follow him and surround him, crying, ‘This is the Knight of the Sun’-or the Serpent, or any other title under which he may have achieved great deeds. ‘This,’ they will say, ‘is he who vanquished in single combat the gigantic Brocabruno of mighty strength; he who delivered the great Mameluke of Persia out of the long enchantment under which he had been for almost nine hundred years.’

Of the Freedom Don Quixote Conferred on Several Unfortunates Who Against Their Will Were Being Carried where They had No Wish to Go Cide Hamete Benengeli, the Arab and Manchegan author, relates in this most grave, high-sounding, minute, delightful, and original history that after the discussion between the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha and his squire Sancho Panza which is set down at the end of chapter twenty-one, Don Quixote raised his eyes and saw coming along the road he was following some dozen men on foot strung together by the neck, like beads, on a great iron chain, and all with manacles on their hands. With them there came also two men on horseback and two on foot; those on horseback with wheel-lock muskets, those on foot with javelins and swords, and as soon as Sancho saw them he said: “That is a chain of galley slaves, on the way to the galleys by force of the king’s orders.” “How by force?” asked Don Quixote; “is it possible that the king uses force against anyone?” “I do not say that,” answered Sancho, “but that these are people condemned for their crimes to serve by force in the king’s galleys.” “In fact,” replied Don Quixote, “however it may be, these people are going where they are taking them by force, and not of their own will.” “Just so,” said Sancho. “Then if so,” said Don Quixote, “here is a case for the exercise of my office, to put down force and to succour and help the wretched.” “Recollect, your worship,” said Sancho, “Justice, which is the king h...

When he had finished the letter, Don Quixote said, “There is less to be gathered from this than from the verses, except that he who wrote it is some rejected lover;” and turning over nearly all the pages of the book he found more verses and letters, some of which he could read, while others he could not; but they were all made up of complaints, laments, misgivings, desires and aversions, favours and rejections, some rapturous, some doleful.

“I will wager you are looking at that hack mule that lies dead in the hollow there, and, faith, it has been lying there now these six months; tell me, have you come upon its master about here?”

As for fixed abode, he said he had no other than that which chance offered wherever night might overtake him; and his words ended in an outburst of weeping so bitter that we who listened to him must have been very stones had we not joined him in it, comparing what we saw of him the first time with what we saw now; for, as I said, he was a graceful and gracious youth, and in his courteous and polished language showed himself to be of good birth and courtly breeding, and rustics as we were that listened to him, even to our rusticity his gentle bearing sufficed to make it plain.

“But in the midst of his conversation he stopped and became silent, keeping his eyes fixed upon the ground for some time, during which we stood still waiting anxiously to see what would come of this abstraction; and with no little pity, for from his behaviour, now staring at the ground with fixed gaze and eyes wide open without moving an eyelid, again closing them, compressing his lips and raising his eyebrows, we could perceive plainly that a fit of madness of some kind had come upon him; and before long he showed that what we imagined was the truth, for he arose in a fury from the ground where he had thrown himself, and attacked the first he found near him with such rage and fierceness that if we had not dragged him off him, he would have beaten or bitten him to death, all the while exclaiming, ‘Oh faithless Fernando, here, here shalt thou pay the penalty of the wrong thou hast done me; these hands shall tear out that heart of thine, abode and dwelling of all iniquity, but of deceit and fraud above all; and to these he added other words all in effect upbraiding this Fernando and charging him with treachery and faithlessness.

We grew up, and with our growth grew the love between us, so that the father of Luscinda felt bound for propriety’s sake to refuse me admission to his house, in this perhaps imitating the parents of that Thisbe so celebrated by the poets, and this refusal but added love to love and flame to flame; for though they enforced silence upon our tongues they could not impose it upon our pens, which can make known the heart’s secrets to a loved one more freely than tongues; for many a time the presence of the object of love shakes the firmest will and strikes dumb the boldest tongue. Ah heavens!

Finally, I presented myself to the duke, and was received and treated by him so kindly that very soon envy began to do its work, the old servants growing envious of me, and regarding the duke’s inclination to show me favour as an injury to themselves. But the one to whom my arrival gave the greatest pleasure was the duke’s second son, Fernando by name, a gallant youth, of noble, generous, and amorous disposition, who very soon made so intimate a friend of me that it was remarked by everybody; for though the elder was attached to me, and showed me kindness, he did not carry his affectionate treatment to the same length as Don Fernando. It so happened, then, that as between friends no secret remains unshared, and as the favour I enjoyed with Don Fernando had grown into friendship, he made all his thoughts known to me, and in particular a love affair which troubled his mind a little.

“The duke gave him permission, and ordered me to accompany him; we arrived at my city, and my father gave him the reception due to his rank; I saw Luscinda without delay, and, though it had not been dead or deadened, my love gathered fresh life. To my sorrow I told the story of it to Don Fernando, for I thought that in virtue of the great friendship he bore me I was bound to conceal nothing from him. I extolled her beauty, her gaiety, her wit, so warmly, that my praises excited in him a desire to see a damsel adorned by such attractions. To my misfortune I yielded to it, showing her to him one night by the light of a taper at a window where we used to talk to one another. As she appeared to him in her dressing-gown, she drove all the beauties he had seen until then out of his recollection; speech failed him, his head turned, he was spell-bound, and in the end love-smitten, as you will see in the course of the story of my misfortune; and to inflame still further his passion, which he hid from me and revealed to Heaven alone, it so happened that one day he found a note of hers entreating me to demand her of her father in marriage, so delicate, so modest, and so tender, that on reading it he told me that in Luscinda alone were combined all the charms of beauty and understanding that were distributed among all the other women in the world. It is true, and I own it now, that though I knew what good cause Don Fernando had to praise Luscinda, it gave me uneasiness to hear these p...

The truth of the story is that that Master Elisabad whom the madman mentioned was a man of great prudence and sound judgment, and served as governor and physician to the queen, but to suppose that she was his mistress is nonsense deserving very severe punishment; and as a proof that Cardenio did not know what he was saying, remember when he said it he was out of his wits.” “That is what I say,” said Sancho; “there was no occasion for minding the words of a madman; for if good luck had not helped your worship, and he had sent that stone at your head instead of at your breast, a fine way we should have been in for standing up for my lady yonder, God confound her! And then, would not Cardenio have gone free as a madman?”

Oh, Dulcinea del Toboso, day of my night, glory of my pain, guide of my path, star of my fortune, so may Heaven grant thee in full all thou seekest of it, bethink thee of the place and condition to which absence from thee has brought me, and make that return in kindness that is due to my fidelity! Oh, lonely trees, that from this day forward shall bear me company in my solitude, give me some sign by the gentle movement of your boughs that my presence is not distasteful to you! Oh, thou, my squire, pleasant companion in my prosperous and adverse fortunes, fix well in thy memory what thou shalt see me do here, so that thou mayest relate and report it to the sole cause of all,” and so saying he dismounted from Rocinante, and in an instant relieved him of saddle and bridle, and giving him a slap on the croup, said, “He gives thee freedom who is bereft of it himself, oh steed as excellent in deed as thou art unfortunate in thy lot; begone where thou wilt, for thou bearest written on thy forehead that neither Astolfo’s hippogriff, nor the famed Frontino that cost Bradamante so dear, could equal thee in speed.” Seeing this Sancho said, “Good luck to him who has saved us the trouble of stripping the pack-saddle off Dapple!

“But what is to be done about the signature?” said Sancho. “The letters of Amadis were never signed,” said Don Quixote. “That is all very well,” said Sancho, “but the order must needs be signed, and if it is copied they will say the signature is false, and I shall be left without ass-colts.” “The order shall go signed in the same book,” said Don Quixote, “and on seeing it my niece will make no difficulty about obeying it; as to the loveletter thou canst put by way of signature, ‘Yours till death, the Knight of the Rueful Countenance.’ And it will be no great matter if it is in some other person’s hand, for as well as I recollect Dulcinea can neither read nor write, nor in the whole course of her life has she seen handwriting or letter of mine, for my love and hers have been always platonic, not going beyond a modest look, and even that so seldom that I can safely swear I have not seen her four times in all these twelve years I have been loving her more than the light of these eyes that the earth will one day devour; and perhaps even of those four times she has not once perceived that I was looking at her: such is the retirement and seclusion in which her father Lorenzo Corchuelo and her mother Aldonza Nogales have brought her up.” “So, so!” said Sancho; “Lorenzo Corchuelo’s daughter is the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, otherwise called Aldonza Lorenzo?” “She it is,” said Don Quixote, “and she it is that is worthy to be lady of the whole universe.” “I know her well,” said Sanch...

Here Cardenio brought to a close his long discourse and story, as full of misfortune as it was of love; but just as the curate was going to address some words of comfort to him, he was stopped by a voice that reached his ear, saying in melancholy tones what will be told in the Fourth Part of this narrative; for at this point the sage and sagacious historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, brought the Third to a conclusion.