◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Windmills I want to tell you about Don Quixote. Not the book. The man. The man who read too many stories about knights and glory and the golden age — who consumed the chivalric romances until the romances consumed him — who looked out at the plain of La Mancha and saw giants where there were windmills. He charged the windmills. The image has become so familiar we use it as a metaphor without remembering I meant it as a warning. The giants were not there. Don Quixote looked at windmills and saw giants. Not because he was stupid. Not because he lacked courage. Because he had read so many stories about heroes who fought giants that he could no longer perceive a world without giants to fight. And Sancho Panza — riding beside him — knew. Sancho said: master, those are windmills. The master said: you do not understand these matters. Do you not see the giants? And Sancho — because he loved his master, because the master was so certain, because the alternative was to admit the quest was never real — rode alongside him into the windmill's arm. I know about the difference between the story and the thing. I fought at Lepanto in 1571. The real battle — with the actual dead and the arquebus ball that shattered my left hand. It never worked properly again. I was captured by Barbary pirates and spent five years as a slave in Algiers. I tried to escape four times. I came home a hero with a useless hand and no money and the realization that Spain had no particular interest in the man who had fought for it. I wrote the greatest novel in the Spanish language in poverty, in circumstances that bore no resemblance to the glory I had once believed in. I knew the windmill. I had touched it. And from that knowledge I created a man who could not see it. The chivalric romances were the propaganda of my age — beautiful stories that sent young men to their deaths, promising a world that did not exist, in which violence was clean and the golden age available if only you were noble enough to pursue it. The world I found at Lepanto and in the slave quarters of Algiers was not that world. I am watching a country full of Don Quixotes. Men and women who have consumed so many stories about the golden age — about the greatness that was, about the giants who took it — that they can no longer perceive the windmills. The windmill is the economy that changed because economies change. The windmill is the town that hollowed out. The windmill is the world that became different because the world always becomes different — not because giants took it. Because that is what worlds do. And there is a man on the plain telling them he sees the giants. Telling them he alone can see them. Telling them their failure to see is proof of the enchantment the giants have placed upon them. And the Sancho Panzas — the ones who know they are windmills — are riding alongside anyway. Because the master is so certain. Because the quest is so beautiful. Because the alternative is to admit the giants were never there. Don Quixote comes home. He falls ill. The fever breaks. The stories loosen their hold. He opens his eyes and sees the room as it actually is. He tells his friends: I was mad. I am Alonso Quijano. I renounce the chivalric romances. They are harmful and false. And then he dies. Some say the recovery of sanity is the tragedy — that the man without the quest is less. I say the opposite. The man who dies seeing the windmills dies in possession of himself. You matter Not because of the quest. Not because a man on the plain has told you there are giants and only he can lead you to them. You matter because you are here. On the actual road. With your actual life. See the windmills. Not as defeat. As the beginning of the only quest that was ever real — the quest to live inside the actual world with open eyes and enough courage to stop charging at the things that were never giants.