Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

This wondrous silence, and the thoughts of our knight, which always were turned to the events constantly recounted in the books responsible for his misfortune, brought to his mind as strange a bit of madness as anyone could imagine, and it was that he thought he had come to a famous castle—for, as has been said, it seemed to him that all the inns where he stayed were castles—and that the innkeeper’s daughter was the daughter of the lord of the castle, and that she, conquered by his gentle bearing, had fallen in love with him and had promised to steal away from her parents that night and come and lie with him for a time; and since he considered this entire fantasy, which he had invented, as solid and true, he became distressed as he began to think of the dangerous predicament in which his virtue would find itself, and he resolved in his heart not to betray his lady Dulcinea of Toboso even if Queen Guinevere herself, along with her duenna Quintañona, were to appear before him.

I wonder if this idea of interpreting our own situations and relationships through the lens of fanciful stories is not extremely salient in the age of social media, reality TV, and other sorts of concocted drama. I've heard people speaking of their lives and relationships in overly dramatic terms that they surely picked up from some TV show or influencer and I wonder... are they not suffering from the same bit of madness as Don Quixote? Or the poor fool who imagines an attraction/love where there is clearly none....?