“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading,
his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.” —Spanish novelist Miguel
de Cervantes (1547-1616),
Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605)
Miguel de Cervantes—born
on this day in 1547—is lucky to have stayed alive long enough to write his
masterpiece. At the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, he suffered three grave
wounds—two gunshot wounds to the chest and another that completely maimed his
left hand.
As if that weren’t enough, he was captured by pirates
and imprisoned for five years, then jailed on two more occasions owing money to
the treasury from a shortage in his accounts.
Maybe Cervantes needed to find a laugh somehow, somewhere
to get his mind off his terrible situation. In any case, he came up with one of
the great satires in world literature: a parody of chivalric romances.
In the process, he offered the world one of the most
indelible depictions of the clash between illusion and reality, in this scene
that has become immortal:
“Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and
see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill
each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich
ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to
God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth."
"What giants?" asked Sancho
Panza.
"The ones you can see over
there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are
very nearly two leagues long."
"Now look, your grace," said
Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what
seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the
millstone."
"Obviously," replied Don
Quijote, "you don't know much about adventures.”
Cervantes, the greatest writer in the Spanish language,
died in April 1616 on the same day as William Shakespeare, arguably the
greatest writer in the English language.
(The image accompanying this post comes from the film
adaptation of Man of La Mancha, with Peter O’Toole as Don Quixote.)
