Passion and Quixotism
Spanish literature begins with a madman fighting a windmill, and that spirit of beautiful, tragic idealism runs through its history. It is a tradition that embraces the contradictions of life: the sacred and the profane, the tragic and the comic, the real and the imagined.
At its heart is a deep humanity—a willingness to look at our flaws and laugh, or to look at our dreams and weep. It reminds us that to be human is to be a little bit crazy, and that is something to be celebrated.
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
The book that invented the modern novel. What begins as a slapstick satire of chivalry evolves into a profound meditation on the power of dreams and the nature of reality. Alonso Quixano, an aging gentleman, reads so many books about knights that he loses his mind and decides to become one. Renaming himself Don Quixote, he recruits a simple farmer named Sancho Panza as his squire and sets out to right wrongs. The novel is built on the contrast between Quixote's idealism (he sees windmills as giants) and Sancho's realism (he sees them as windmills). As their journey continues, the two characters influence each other: Quixote becomes more grounded, and Sancho becomes more of a dreamer. It is a story about the friendship that bridges the gap between who we are and who we want to be.