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Kindle Notes & Highlights
What is the true object of Don Quixote’s quest? I find that unanswerable. What are Hamlet’s authentic motives? We are not permitted to know.
Herman Melville blended Don Quixote and Hamlet in Captain Ahab (with a touch of Milton’s Satan added for seasoning). Ahab desires to avenge himself upon the white whale, while Satan would destroy God, if only he could. Hamlet is death’s ambassador to us, according to G. Wilson Knight.
Don Quixote says that his quest is to destroy injustice. The final injustice is death, the ultimate bondage. To set captives free is the knight’s pragmatic way of battling against death.
King Lear’s first performance took place as part I of Don Quixote was published.
Poetry, particularly Shakespeare’s, teaches us how to talk to ourselves, but not to others.
Friendship in Shakespeare is ironic at best, treacherous more commonly. The friendship between Sancho Panza and his Knight surpasses any other in literary representation.
Done eris felix, multos numerabis amicos, Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris.
Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.
In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind.
His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courtings, loves, torments, and other impossible foolishness, and he became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer.
The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame.
what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease.”
at times the just must pay for sinners.
Wouldn’t it be better to stay peacefully in your house and not wander around the world searching for bread made from something better than wheat, never stopping to think that many people go looking for wool and come back shorn?”
“It seems clear to me,” replied Don Quixote, “that thou art not well-versed in the matter of adventures: these are giants; and if thou art afraid, move aside and start to pray whilst I enter with them in fierce and unequal combat.”
“Have your graces not read,” responded Don Quixote, “the annals and histories of England, in which are recounted the famous deeds of King Arthur, whom, in our Castilian ballads, we continuously call King Artús?
And, as the old saying goes, the cat chased the rat, the rat chased the rope, the rope chased the stick: the muledriver hit Sancho, Sancho hit the girl, the girl hit Sancho, the innkeeper hit the girl, and all of them acted so fast and furiously that they did not let up for an instant; then, the best part was that the innkeeper’s lamp went out, and since they were in darkness, everyone hit everyone with so little mercy that wherever their hands landed they left nothing whole and sound.
“Do not be afraid, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “for heaven will deal more kindly with you than that.”
