Don Quixote of la Mancha [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Don Quixote, a lanky scarecrow of a man with his withered face and lantern jaw, dons his rusty armour and mounts his ramshackle steed Rozinante. With lance couched he still rides through our lives followed by his pot-bellied squire Sancho Panza. The ill-sorted pair played a prominent part in the world of our grandparents and parents, and we transmit their message to our children and grandchildren. The indissoluble pair rub shoulders with many other heroes—with the melancholy Ulysses "of the many wiles," meandering home to the faithful Penelope after the ten-year Trojan War, with Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves, with Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe, with Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, with all the rest of the never-dead who linger in the hidden spaces of one's subconscious mind ready to be conjured up in moments of reverie. Don Quixote has always been one of the world's best books for reading out to the family circle on Sunday evenings, according to a secular tradition observed in self-respecting families aU over the world. Don Quixote and Sancho refuse to grow old and musty, and they still amble on at the sweet whim of Rozinante and Dapple over the roads of Spain which, as Barbey d'Aurevilly said, "ne sont nulle part décrites," and as we emerge from childhood we do not forget the Knight of the Rueful Figure and his squire, for now we begin to sympathize with the Don and we become piteous of his case. Yet smiling at his rueful length of face. (I) We return to them both as if they were long-lost friends. In a sense they are more genuine than many friends we possess in real life, for they do not change from minute to minute, and we know that as soon as we open the book they wUl speak to us and take us into their counsels. Their friendship is indeed inexhaustible, because, no matter how often we read certain chapters, we discover new qualities and sidelights in them, and they fill us with optimism, even in later life, when our mentor Montaigne keeps whispering in our ear that old age leaves more wrinkles on the mind than on the face. Don Quixote has a message for man's seven ages: at school we roar with gusto at the spectacle of Sancho tossed in the blanket like dogs at Shrovetide: at coUege we freshmen seek out the story of the lovesick Cardenio and Luscinda of the emerald eyes, and when we write woeful ballads to our mis- ix