A Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote

Tired of his Spanish homeland, an old soldier of the king sought diversion in Ariosto's far-flung journeys, in the valley of the moon where the time wasted in dreams is assembled, and in the golden idol of Mohammed, which the lord of Montalbano stole.

In gentle self-mockery, he dreamed up a gullible man who, stirred by his reading of fanciful tales, set off on a quest for adventure and glamour in prosaic places called El Toboso and Montiel. Defeated by the real world, by Spain, Don Quixote died in his native village in about 1614. Miguel de Cervantes briefly survived him. For both of them, the dreamer and the dreamed, at the heart of all this was the clash of two worlds - the unreal world of chivalric tales and the common, everyday world of the seventeenth century.

They had no inkling that in time the years would temper the conflict, they had no inkling that La Mancha and Montiel and the lean figure of the knight would one day be as poetic as the exploits of Sinbad or Ariosto's far-flung journeys. For at the beginning of literature, as well as at the end, is myth.

Devoto Hospital, January 1955