Windmills (Part 2)

Extracts from my journal, July 29, 2010:

During the time I was home, all I wanted to do, as friends & family cycled through the house with store-bought pies & fried chicken, was to escape into Don Quixote.  It's a good book to escape into: very long, set in a far-off place & time, verbose & redundant enough that the mind can wander from the story & return to it without missing much.  Note: the point was not to distract myself, but to escape into a place of solitude where I could be however I needed to be.  Like going alone into the mountains or to the seashore.  My initial impulse, though, was not to escape but to read it for Joey, because he never got to.  It's a strange impulse - wherever he is, it's unlikely that he needs me to help him experience stuff for him.  Yet it feels right to do things for him - there was much he wanted to do and never got to.  And since we always experienced the world through one another - whether we were together or apart, the kinds of things we did & enjoyed doing were the products of shared taste, done because these were the kinds of things we did, and eventually shared with the other through gifts or stories, often with the implicit purpose of making the other jealous - because, as I say, we experienced the world through each other, it made sense to read Don Quixote for him.  Much else that I plan to do, I think, I plan to do for him & with him, and in that sense nothing's changed.

So would Joey have enjoyed Don Quixote?  It's hard to say.  He would certainly have felt pleasure in completing it, in being able to cross it off his list [he was a great completer of lists] - as, of course, did I.  I think he would also have enjoyed the humor - Joey greatly admired funny literature, and the book (at least in this translation) is quite funny.  He might have gotten bored with the many digressions & subplots (as, at times, was I), and he might have found the modernized translation awkward (as did I).  I think he would have mapped out the places Quixote & Sancho Panza visit, and he might have tried to seek these places out in Spain.  He would not, I think, have enjoyed the self-referencing of the book as much as I, the moments when Cervantes lifts the veil & comments on his own works or has characters talk about reading the book they are currently in.  He would have felt this way for the same reason he didn't watch DVD commentaries - he didn't, as he once said, want to break the illusion that the these stories were real.  He preferred to immerse himself in a story and not think too much about the process by which it was created.  He tried to ignore the artifice and just take the story on its own terms. ... 

I didn't start reading Don Quixote with the intention of drawing any particular lessons from, or parallels with, Joey's life or death, but it did help me think through some things, or at least meditate on things.  It is, essentially, a road-trip story and a buddy story.  It's about love between two men who bicker & love & are loyal to each other like brothers.  Sancho joins Quixote, initially, because he's hoping to become the governor of an island.  But he sticks with him well after it becomes clear that his master is slightly cracked, and his greed gives way to respect.  When he finally becomes a governor he does it well but doesn't enjoy it, and he returns to Quixote out of simple loyalty & love, resolving to sleep on the ground & eat wild herbs with him for the sake of the adventures they'll have.  Quixote, meanwhile, sticks with Pancho even though he's a loudmouth & not much of a squire - more a liability than anything, actually - but he admires his good sense & appreciates that Sancho, uniquely in his experience, takes him seriously.

It would be facile to suggest some easy equivalence between these two characters and Joey & me.  He's not much like either Quixote or Sancho, and I'm not, either.  But their friendship - or kinship - is similar.  They bicker constantly but cling to one another like brothers, and, physical differences apart, they resemble one another in striking ways.  They grab life by the throat, they seek out adventures, they imagine the world to hold great secrets & experiences around every corner.  They make things happen.  They retain their dignity regardless of what befalls them (by dignity I mean respect for themselves, even if others laugh at them).  They have a good sense of themselves - they know who they are & what they value, and to hell with what the people around them think or do.  I can't say that Joey and I shared all of those qualities, but I can say that we aspired to them.  And when we were together we did inhabit our own world, with its own codes & rules.  This was true of our childhood - with its stuffed animals & GI Joes - and of our adulthood - with all its quirky enthusiasms.

I got a bit choked up on the last chapter, in which Don Quixote dies.  I knew he would become disillusioned, but I didn't expect him to die.  Before he died he had talked with Sancho & his other friends about living the life of shepherds in the fields.  He'd been vanquished as a knight, but he refused to abandon his imaginary world.  In the end he recovered his "sanity" and, though he'd taken ill as a result of his defeat as a knight, he died (I think) as a result of becoming "sane." That is, the minute he abandoned his imaginary world, he abandoned his life.  As he's dying, Sancho comes to him and tells him to hang on, to think of all the adventures they'd have as shepherds.  [It's an incredibly poignant moment, demonstrating just how much Sancho's identity has become intertwined with Quixote's and just how much he's come to love the mad old knight.]  And still Quixote dies.

I wonder, though, if Sancho maybe went ahead and played shepherd without him.