I. Hunting for Adventures No vio la hora don Quijote de verse a caballo y salir buscando las aven... more I. Hunting for Adventures No vio la hora don Quijote de verse a caballo y salir buscando las aventuras. Part I, Chapter III 2 Don Quixote's narrator states that Alonso Quijano comes to enjoy reading high and low tales of knighthood better than hunting. This piece of seemingly biographical trivia actually highlights how consumed by his books the hidalgo is: he gives up a cherished pastime for a fool's knightly dream. We don't know whether Quijano was a good shot with bow, crossbow, or maybe harquebus. We know that by the time of his transformation inside and out his stalking ability was no match for his rhetorical talent for knightly self-promotion and hunger for adventure. While such behavioral changes pique our curiosity and demand impossible rational explanations—after all, to our eyes they are irrational already—ours is a different target here. The melancholy yet proud Don Quijote, astride Rocinante lance pointed at us, defiantly asks: " Quickly, state your purpose! " Given his short temper, it is best not to dillydally. The aim is to track Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote for literary, philosophic, and existential insights that may coalesce into revealing self-reflections to bring us, readers, a sporting chance to bag some Socratic self-knowledge. We are setting out on a Quixotean intellectual hunt in lands richly populated by irony and paradox. While infinitely easier than Pierre Menard's outlandish task of rewriting portions of the Quixote anew, it still is intimidating. To better hunt down the elusive game we pursue, we recruit three able, insightful companions who sequentially and ever more discriminately support our endeavor. The passionate scout Miguel de Unamuno sets us on track, while José Ortega y Gasset's philosophic skills corner the fantastic literary prey (Ortega hereafter), and Jorge Luis Borges finally looses his hounding thoughts on novel and novelist to get us within range. 3 Unsurprisingly, this is a game of mirrors on and off the page. Mirrors not only duplicate realities or create labyrinthine possibilities, but more importantly for us, they reflect back our own visage. With apposite Borgesian circularity various insights and themes— literary interpretation, (im)mortality, and self-knowledge, to name three—are revisited and refined as we follow the triad of intellectual Nimrods chasing book and hero. Presently, " Don Quixote " refers to the novel whereas " Don Quijote " is used to speak of the character. According to the analysis we develop, and to be clarified in the going, this indicates that Don Quijote is more than a character in the novel. It also showcases a certain flexible metaphysical reflexivity that multiplies possibilities and meanings as something desirable for our novels and our lives. Let's describe this project geometrically, something Borges would have undoubtedly smiled on, however ruefully. A horizontal line encompasses the literary horizon with Borges and Cervantes as its defining points of origin and terminus. It is bisected by a vertical line, philosophy, demarcated at either end by Spain's preeminent 20 th century philosophical hounds: Ortega and Unamuno. The intersection of the two lines is a mathematically dimensionless point full of significance. As crosshairs they enable us, should our hand prove steady enough, to revealingly track our knight's actions and words, and explore their meaning. \
I. Hunting for Adventures No vio la hora don Quijote de verse a caballo y salir buscando las aven... more I. Hunting for Adventures No vio la hora don Quijote de verse a caballo y salir buscando las aventuras. Part I, Chapter III 2 Don Quixote's narrator states that Alonso Quijano comes to enjoy reading high and low tales of knighthood better than hunting. This piece of seemingly biographical trivia actually highlights how consumed by his books the hidalgo is: he gives up a cherished pastime for a fool's knightly dream. We don't know whether Quijano was a good shot with bow, crossbow, or maybe harquebus. We know that by the time of his transformation inside and out his stalking ability was no match for his rhetorical talent for knightly self-promotion and hunger for adventure. While such behavioral changes pique our curiosity and demand impossible rational explanations—after all, to our eyes they are irrational already—ours is a different target here. The melancholy yet proud Don Quijote, astride Rocinante lance pointed at us, defiantly asks: " Quickly, state your purpose! " Given his short temper, it is best not to dillydally. The aim is to track Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote for literary, philosophic, and existential insights that may coalesce into revealing self-reflections to bring us, readers, a sporting chance to bag some Socratic self-knowledge. We are setting out on a Quixotean intellectual hunt in lands richly populated by irony and paradox. While infinitely easier than Pierre Menard's outlandish task of rewriting portions of the Quixote anew, it still is intimidating. To better hunt down the elusive game we pursue, we recruit three able, insightful companions who sequentially and ever more discriminately support our endeavor. The passionate scout Miguel de Unamuno sets us on track, while José Ortega y Gasset's philosophic skills corner the fantastic literary prey (Ortega hereafter), and Jorge Luis Borges finally looses his hounding thoughts on novel and novelist to get us within range. 3 Unsurprisingly, this is a game of mirrors on and off the page. Mirrors not only duplicate realities or create labyrinthine possibilities, but more importantly for us, they reflect back our own visage. With apposite Borgesian circularity various insights and themes— literary interpretation, (im)mortality, and self-knowledge, to name three—are revisited and refined as we follow the triad of intellectual Nimrods chasing book and hero. Presently, " Don Quixote " refers to the novel whereas " Don Quijote " is used to speak of the character. According to the analysis we develop, and to be clarified in the going, this indicates that Don Quijote is more than a character in the novel. It also showcases a certain flexible metaphysical reflexivity that multiplies possibilities and meanings as something desirable for our novels and our lives. Let's describe this project geometrically, something Borges would have undoubtedly smiled on, however ruefully. A horizontal line encompasses the literary horizon with Borges and Cervantes as its defining points of origin and terminus. It is bisected by a vertical line, philosophy, demarcated at either end by Spain's preeminent 20 th century philosophical hounds: Ortega and Unamuno. The intersection of the two lines is a mathematically dimensionless point full of significance. As crosshairs they enable us, should our hand prove steady enough, to revealingly track our knight's actions and words, and explore their meaning. \
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Drafts by Helen Stanbro