Don Quixote

George Bernard Shaw once said, “Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.” Shaw was wrong. Don Quixote was a gentleman by birth, long before he began to read. And as for the accusation that believing what he read made him mad, I deny that it ever had any such effect. He simply had an extraordinarily keen sense of chivalry and romance, and was unfortunately born in an age of people who were lacking in that faculty. That he saw giants where others saw only windmills, was not a sign of his supposed mental degeneracy, but of the rest of the world’s blindness. The giants were not imaginary. Can anyone fail to see in those windmills, a symbol of the growing power of science and technology, and fault Don Quixote for wanting to take them down a peg or two? Do we blame him because it happened that the windmills took him down instead? Don Quixote was one of the great people who are able to find adventure even in common experiences, but let us hope that he is not the last. To look at a broken down nag and say “Rocinante”—not the nag that you were, but what I will make of you now—what is that but to follow in the footsteps of the Highest? Let there be more such men.