So Many Windmills, So Little Time.
Thank you for emailing me!
I’m OOO from 4/14 - 4/19. When I get back, I hope I see your email. Until then, I invite you to read (or re-read) the novel Don Quixote. It describes the rich terrain I will visit during these five April days when I will be away from my inbox and unable to reply to your email.
I think you should also watch an episode of the old TV show Perry Mason. I’m not sure which episode.
The genius of Quixote is relevant here because, I will now contend, vacations are either a welcome kind of temporary delusion, OR everything else is an unwelcome delusion and it’s the vacations that are the real real. Anyone who’s returned from a vacation has felt what I mean. While on vacation, you come to believe life can always be that way. Until, you realize as you stuff your sandy shorts into your suitcase on that last day, it can’t. Don got around all that with his superpower to always be on permanent vacation IN HIS MIND.
The novel's oft-forgotten full title is "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha". You may remember, it's a rollicking farce about a "knight errant" who lights out with his sidekick Sancho Panza to tilt at windmills he believes are giants, and win the love of Dulcinea.
SOLD!
Back there in 1605 (and btw, it’s like the first novel EVER), Miguel de Cervantes was onto something. Science now knows that pretty much everything that's in your mind is something your brain makes up. It seems Cervantesknew it long before science did. Now, I don't know what the universe truly looks like independent of human perception—something mushy with energy waves or quarks or gluons. Or whatever.
I just know it all reaches our eyeballs "some assembly required" and we humans put it together in some predictably similar bad, good, and indifferent ways from there. Cervantes wrote how Don was not so predictable—his brain assembled markedly different images than other humans, and he stuck by those "delusions" with comical vehemence. Windmills were monstrous GIANTS, for instance, and he was just the guy to tackle ‘em.
I always liked that guy!
Don’s delusions were fun, honorable, and absurdly optimistic. I think even Sancho Panzo would agree, even though he seemed to bear the brunt of the reality of which Don was blissfully ignorant. Sancho really got his ass kicked, let’s be honest, in the same way humble underlings everywhere get their ass kicked every day whilst sidekicking less-humble folks certain that they alone are DESTINED FOR GREATNESS. Know anyone like that?
Anyway, Don Quixote’s chock full of knightly nuggets about how much of our reality is actively created by our own perceptions, worldviews, and delusions:
"It seems to me that you aren't well-versed in adventures--those are giants; and if you are afraid, get away from here and start praying while I charge into fierce and unequal battle with them."
"The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water."
"Hunger is the best sauce in the world."
"Too much sanity may be madness, and the maddest of all, to see life only as it is and not as it should be."
"All these storms falling upon us are signs that the weather will soon clear and that things will go well for us, for neither good nor bad can last forever."
"For neither good nor evil can last forever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand."
"I've always heard the old folks say that if you don't know how to enjoy good luck when it comes, you shouldn't complain if it passes you by."
"Thou hast seen nothing yet.”
The ultimate capper quote, though does not come from Don or Cervantes at all, though it is clearly inspired by it. It should, I believe, be credited to Della Street, the fictional secretary on the 50's television show Perry Mason, an ahead-of-her-time badass in her own right:
"So many windmills. So little time."
That line may itself be the greatest OOO Auto Reply email reply subject line ever crafted. Maybe I buried the lede. But if you have a better one, email me when I get back on April 19.
