DON QUIXOTE ATTACKS THE WINDMILLS
http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/don-quixote.htm
Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quixote" is one of the most wonderful books in
the world. A middle-aged country gentleman, brain addled by reading too many
chivalric adventure stories, adopts the trappings of a medieval knight and
sets out to rescue damsels in distress and otherwise right any wrongs he may
come across. He convinces a naive but commonsensical neighboring peasant,
Sancho Panza, to accompany him as his squire. Their conversations as they
travel along are even more entertaining than their predictably amusing
adventures. The novel may have started out as a mere satire of the already
largely outmoded genre of chivalric romance, but Don Quixote and Sancho soon
took on a life of their own and became two of the best-loved characters in
world literature.
The new webpage presents the famous adventure of the windmills in the
original Spanish along with four modern English translations.
The BPS website also includes Kenneth Rexroth's superb essay on the book
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/cr/6.htm#Quixote
"Many people, not all of them Spanish, are on record as believing that 'Don
Quixote' is the greatest prose fiction ever produced in the Western world.
Certainly it is one of the few books a genuinely international critic would
dare to group with 'The Dream of the Red Chamber' or 'The Tale of Genji' or
'The Mahabharata'. It epitomizes the spiritual world of European man at
mid-career as 'The Odyssey' and 'The Iliad' do at his beginnings and as 'The
Brothers Karamazov' does in his decline. . . . Don Quixote starts on his
quest with his head full of phantasm. What he finds is his own identity, but
he finds it in communion with others. He discovers what Don Quixote is
really like by discovering that other people are like himself and that he is
like them. The mystery that is slowly unveiled in the course of his
complicated adventures is the mystery of the facts of life. . . . Possibly
all great fictions deal with self-realization, with the integration of the
personality. This is, in a special way, the subject of 'Don Quixote'. Even
more than in the wise reveries of Montaigne, Cervantes in this golden book
gives us the purest expression of humanism -- not just its message, but its
special wisdom that can be found only in adventure in the manifold,
inexhaustibly eventful ways of men." (Rexroth)
BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
http://www.bopsecrets.org
"Making petrified conditions dance by singing them their own tune."
Fwd by
John Willemsens,
Advayavada Foundation.
<http://www.euronet.nl/~advaya/index.htm>
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