The End of Don Quixote

This is a very sad day. No longer will I be able to sit for an hour and listen to the poetry that is Dr. Sexson and his knowledge of literature. No longer will escape to the fantastical world of Don Quixote and the mad adventures of the Knight of the Lions, formally The Knight of the Sorrowful face. Don Quixote...and Don Quixote has come to an end in many ways on several levels.

One, I have finished the grandiose and epic novel Don Quixote. I will no longer be sharing any adventures with our brave knight and his ever faithful and endlessly humorous squire Sancho Panza. The book is done, the text has run out...there is no more. Oh, woe is me. No more. This is my love/hate relationship with a great work of fiction. I start out greedily gobbling up every page, sentence phrase and word of the story and end up creeping along through the last chapter or so. Because, like a child, I don't want the story to end. I want to forever ride with Don Quixote across the perilous earth of ancient...ish...Spain, defending the weak and righting wrongs...but maybe not so much of the beating.

The second way Don Quixote is coming to an end is his return to sanity and his old idenitity of Antonio Quixote. In his last few days of life, Don Quixete supposedly returns to sanity and casts out his books of chivarly as well as condems his past actions of "madness". The Ironic thing here is that all of his friends and family who wanted so desperately for Don Quixote to be sane, wanted him mad again. Carrasco went to such great lengths to "save" Don Quixote from his madness, he probably killed him; physically with his lance and spiritually with his banishing him from knighthood. The seem to realize that his madness was the only thing that was keeping him alive; through the endless beatings and perilous injuries. Knights don't die until they have achieved their goal, and Don Quixote was deprived of his goal...which was really to die as a knight. He was forced to die as Antonio, in the world of reality, forced into sanity.

And finally, Don Quixote is over because, frankly, he dies. The author gives a final farewell and leaves us with a lesson and instructs us to trust in his Don Quixote and no other after Don Quixote finishes his will and condems his madness. It's an ending that's expected, but I can't help but feel disappointed at Don Quixote's surrender to death and reality. I'm still mulling over his true motivations and what is means that he returned once again to Antonio and cast out Don with such heartless freedom.

Well, now it's done. I think I'll start another classic novel. I've been inspired by Kari to look into The Three Musketeers. I feel that now I'm in the mode of epic romantic adventures and want to continue. To be honest, I've never read anything like Don Quixote before and I've fallen in love with it. I feel like I'm reading something delicate, refined, and epic. Something that has run through the veins of literary history and connects readers from all generations and times. It's like how reading Shakespeare makes one real inspires this sublime sensation, well, at least it does for me.