A hidalgo or minor nobleman gets so lost in his reading that he mistakes folklore regarding chivalry as the path of history that will lead him and through him the world to greater nobility. The intention being good. The result a comic tale blended with the tragedy of lofty ambition meeting more than its match in the practicalities the world.
Don Quixote Reexamined, Part I by Michael Doyle I In Cervantes' Don Quixote, we turn pages to find The greatest, finest utterances of the human mind The idle reader is boldly addressed in the preface In admonishment of the tales we daily embrace Unique in its place in the width of things literary We find a man out of sorts railing against chivalry It's a folly of complexity dressed up in simplicity All in the name of correcting the course of history In a man's life there can be too many moments spent On borrowed time which has never truly been lent These can actually come to account for many a year Spent in fantasies of both laughter and tear As it turns out, an excess of reading drives one mad And the resulting loss of practicalities is quite sad Fiction becomes seen as the substance of what is real History itself becomes the things of what it reveals A knight errant is born into this great land Intent on serving as best that the understands Putting into practice what he's read is preached Despite the wrong conclusions dubiously reached Setting his sights on his lady of her musical name He sets forth on the first sally of his chivalric game Musical, beautiful and full of the best of good magic The journeys set out on are both comic and tragic (c) May 12, 2020 Michael Doyle All Rights Reserved
