The Tower of Don Quixote and Spanish history
A Novel to Cross a Desert With
The first tower was built in spring 2017.
It was a narrative totem pole that followed my journey in the footsteps of Don Quixote. What a wonderful thing to reach middle age and know there are countless classics left to read and enjoy. The great el Quixote became the sun around which everything else revolved-- el Escorial and Philip II; Charles V and the two Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand (and in the same breath as the two of them: the Spanish Inquisition and this poignant cookbook, A Drizzle of Honey). There was also Isabella's two sister queens...
Battles were Lepanto (Great reads: Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World (Roger Crowley) and The Battle of Lepanto (Nanami Shiono) and the Ottoman Siege (post coming). Enemy at the Gate and the Vienna Wood.
My favorite book about Cervantes was by María Antonia Garcés. Evoking Freud, Garcés explores the way trauma can be bypassed in the mind; not experienced directly and instead registered in the psyche as a kind of memory of the event that patients or survivors return to again and again, neurotically trying to process what happened to them. Of course, many people have traditionally processed traumatic events by revisiting them in art -- and Cervantes indeed seems to return again and again to issues of captivity and broken narratives. For what is trauma but a deep interruption? Falling through the cracks of one's own life is how I used to put it until I read María Antonia Garcés' book. For trauma is an interruption of life, like a broken thread (el roto hilo de mi historia). And Cervantes himself uses the language of tying up the broken thread in his telling tales. As a former captive of Columbian guerrillas, María Antonia Garcés is very compelling. I love her! I love Spain! I love Spanish! I love el Quixote. Very good news to find a new something to fall in love with.
The Quixote also brought Spanish food and Spanish art into my life.
Art was Bosch. I am still writing about that, but one book that stood out wonderfully was Cees Nooteboom's A Dark Premonition: Journeys to Hieronymus Bosch
This is a book I wish I could have written ~~ To see a masterpiece at 21 and then go back and see it again at 82. How has the painting changed? How has the viewer changed? Is it even the same man? Can we moderns access the picture in the way Philip II did? Have our eyes changed so much?
Art was also Velasquez. Thoughts put in this post: Being Alone With Las Meninas (Forgetting Michel Foucault)
Finally, from Ilan Stavans's book on the Quixote, this on Quijotismo
In its full splendor, El Quijote not only has given birth to an adjective but also has become a doctrine, an ideology dictating the way people ought to live their lives. What exceptionalism and the American Dream are to the United States (more about that later), this ideology—Quijotismo—is to Spain and its former colonies across the Atlantic. Its central tenet is the implicit concept of rebellion: paraphrasing Montaigne, to sacrifice one's life for a dream is to know the truth. -- Ilan Stavans
**Here is my Don Quixote Diary which includes stories from my class at Caltech with Nico.**
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