The modern Don Quixote
I picked up a copy of Don Quixote recently in, of all places, a chain book store in the airport. I was really surprised to find any classic work in a place dedicated to helping travelers just pass the time, so I asked the clerk about it. Apparently it?s one of their bestsellers.
Somehow I think that Don Quixote is selling well to the airplane hordes not just because it's a hell of an entertaining read, which it is, but that the work somehow strikes a chord in post-modern folk?s heart. I could take this in a trivial direction, and make jokes about President Bush tilting at windmills, but truthfully I mean something a little more deep than that. Moreover, I find such analogies offensive, mere liberal whistling in the graveyard, given the uplifting success of the Iraq election. I can't really enjoy lefty jokes when the core of the progressive lexicon is being appropriate, and there are no major Democrats standing up to reclaim concepts like liberty.
No, I really think that Cervantes speaks to our current experience for another, more profound reason. His era, before the Enlightenment but after the Renaissance, and smack in the middle of the Inquisition in Spain, is a little like ours. The dominant political order, the dominant worldview, seems corrupt and ineffective. Traditional concepts of morality seem at best not quite adequate to the new world that?s emerging. And yet the old order is in no way weaker, if anything it seems at the pinnacle of its power. In this context, Cervantes seems to me immeasurably brave. He not only sense this fundamental disconnect and satirizes it, he heartily laughs at the absurdity of it all. This from a man who spent several years of his life held captive for ransom. May I find the strength to have the same courage to laugh.
