Quest for a Quest, or Quixote's Questions Queried by us all

Somebody, maybe Kundera, said that everyone who would read fiction would become a Quixote of sorts, allowing themselves to enter an imagined world and live in that new place, separated from (if familiar to) their own. This willing self-deception is a scant degree away from Alonso Quixano's madness that drives him to be the famous knight in Cervantes's famous story. Nowhere is a reader's quixotic nature more prevalent than in reading Don Quixote itself. At least, that's how it worked for me.

I first tried to read Quixote in 2004, while I was a sophomore in college. Over my initial years at university, a hunger to read all the classics overtook me. (This hunger stretched to music sophomore year, when I finally ordered a couple of Beatles records. Rubber Soul almost kept me from going deeper, but then Revolver confirmed the efforts and opened the door to everything else. But I digress...) I tried some John-Jacques Rousseau, because the "Noble Savage" appealed to my existentialist/nihilistic freshman self (his tedious prose did not). I read Faust, which was interesting in any case, if not great. It was much better than Sorrows of Young Werther, which I didn't get to until a couple years later. I took up the Bible, making it to the legal graveyard that is Deuteronomy, or Numbers, I forget which. In any case, Quixote loomed on the horizon, and by the time I finally bought a big, fairly cheap edition, with the Charles Jarvis translation and an introduction by E.C. Riley, I was excited to try.

Over the end of a school year and the summer, I made it about 100 pages. I was just about at the first interpolated episode of romance that Cervantes horns into the story, and for the most part I was entertained. This wasn't the usual muck of a Paradise Lost or Iliad, with fascinating material but mind-numbing verse. The book wasn't great yet, but I could sense Cervantes's sense of humor, and indeed those first episodes are the most memorable for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, of fighting with the coachman and of charging at the windmills. I had a sense that this was worthwhile.

Things happened and I got a little distracted from reading Quixote. But along with those things was a conversation I had with one of my older brother's friends. "Read the abridged version," he told me, "you'll get just as much out of it." I have always had a need for "the real thing", phony as that might be, so the idea of reading an abridged version didn't ring right. But 800+ pages still loomed, and there was school and wrestling to keep busy with, and so somehow I didn't continue reading the book, and didn't pick up an abridged version either. My first attempt had failed like so many battles against sheep.

Near the end of 2005, I found somewhere on a blog, probably associated with Bookslut, the idea of reading 50 books in a year, and of some sort of livejournal community to go with it. I didn't really get the whole community thing, though I started my own livejournal to note brief impressions on the books I would read. I plunged into the effort in 2006, and would have easily passed the mark if not for that inconvenient trip to Russia, where I had to read in my second language for 2 and a half months. I tallied 4 more books on my list, but fell 9 short of the ultimate goal, something I rue to this day...

In response, in 2007 I smashed the number, getting to 55. And there was quality in that number, too: I graded 9 of the books as A's, and 16 as A-'s (grade inflation, I know, but humor me). Some of those books were long too, though none matched up to Quixote (I did read Anna Karenina in 2006, for class. But that's a much lighter read, thanks to Tolstoy's elegance).

Ahh, but here's the rub of all this - it would appear I'm just reading for the sake of reading, for the chance to finish and say, "I've read 55 books, I've read Quixote, etc!" A pretty hollow justification, even if you accept the elitist intellectual climbing desires behind it.

There's no denying the satisfaction in finishing a book though, and being able to say, "Yeah, I've read that." It doesn't have to be boasting, necessarily, but a confident assertion that you've covered some ground, in your own way. And really, that's how you have to approach much of the creative arts - read, listen, watch, look at as much as you can, especially the higher esteemed stuff, and sift through until you get to the stuff that hits you in the chakra, the stuff that really counts. I can't claim to like everything, or most of the things even, that I see in art museums, but then there's the one or two paintings that speak to me, whether Kokoschka's Two Nudes or Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. There's an essential filtering process in the discovery of good art, and that includes rejoicing at the greatness, respecting that which doesn't hit you, and rejecting that which strikes you as wrong, or overly praised.

But there's no point in going through this process if you don't like art, for example. Sure, you give it a chance, and nothing comes of it, why bother. Perhaps the most exceptional example of South Indian verse will strike me as something essential, but if I have to filter through all the rest of it to find that essence, and if I don't like South Indian verse, the effort might not be worth it. Though the discovery of essence is almost always worth it. (I have no thoughts about South Indian verse, of course, either positive or negative).

That's how it is for me with reading. I love reading, and immersing myself into a good new book, into burying myself in the author's world. That's a big part of my desire to write - to share in that process from the other side.

When I read, my favorite moment is almost always the first few pages after the halfway mark in a book. By then, either one of two things occur to me. If the author has earned my trust, then I savor the pleasure ensured to me in the second half of the book, as well as the knowledge that soon I'll be done with the book, and be able to possess it intellectually as a complete entity (or in Kafka's case, an entity that was almost complete and still better than everybody else). If the author hasn't earned my trust, at least I'm halfway done with the book. Or as with Edith Wharton, my perception of the quality can be totally flipped to the good.

In this love of reading, including both the journey and the destination, I see something of a duality inherent in almost anything, between the intellectual and the sensual. There's the same sort of mental satisfaction that accompanies the physical joys to all sorts of acts, from sports to food to sex (not that I'd know...) to friendship. There's the satisfaction of the act itself, but also the thrill of doing the right thing, of doing what you "want" to do, or "should" do. It's a thrill to be with another person because you enjoy their company, but also because at the time, that's right. (This idea doesn't quite reach everywhere - I had a hard time thinking how I get intellectual satisfaction from eating a peanut butter sandwich, except for the frequency with which I do it at home, which makes me unusual, which I like. And also the nostalgic ties to childhood and other lost innocences, I suppose, but then we'd get too psychological).

So to return to Quixote, I took another shot at it in 2007, I believe. While at home I got about 70 pages deep, starting at the beginning again, and then put it off for more pressing books. And somewhere between those two efforts there may have been another attempt at the behemoth, with similarly scant results.

When I set my plans to go to Madrid, at last, I decided that this would be the perfect time to read Quixote to the end, at last. I would accept no failure, and would push through the droughts that kept me from completion in the past. And then I'd find out if it was worth the effort.

On the interminable plane ride to Madrid, via Paris, where I could not sleep and where my ears got blocked up terribly, affected further by a cold I caught from my sister just before leaving, which also left my voice in tattered shape for a week in Madrid, I returned to the same 100 pages I had already read, more or less. I went through them fairly quickly, but I had reached that height before, and it was no promise of further success.

Upon first arriving in Madrid, I stayed with Ben, the 3rd person in an apartment that is cozy for 2, and so didn't really have the comfort to read as I might like. Then I had to settle into a new apartment with a landlady I couldn't quite understand. So no progress. But the perhaps most fitting inspiration impelled me to forge to places heretofore unknown to me: my trip to Andalusia with Ben.

Quixote mostly takes place in between Andalusia and Madrid, meaning we were only going through the setting for the epic. But going through meant a long bus ride with nothing to think about, and that meant a lot of reading time. Not only did I read a lot (240 pages, as mentioned on this blog), but I also read some great stuff. My bookmark features the notes "p.132, p. 147", moments where I not only really liked what I was reading but actually laughed out loud, which I don't do often while reading. The former features Sancho Panza and Don Quixote vomiting on one another, the latter about Sancho telling a story to his master that leads to great arguments. Stupid physical and dialog humor, perhaps, but also really great for something over 400 years old.

That was the big hump for me, though I didn't get to the halfway point. Over the better part of 3 more weeks, I chipped away at the story, before bed or on weekends when I had more free time, or even on the metro when I went to classes on the outskirts of the city. And at last, in the final week of April, with much jollity and sadness, I finished Don Quixote.

See, the end of a great book is bittersweet. There's that satisfaction of completing that I mentioned, but also the sad fact that there's no more to read. This was especially the case with Bolaño's Savage Detectives, a work that I've recommended to people of 4 different nationalities and just about everybody I meet. There the blurry brilliance of the first half slowly enfolds the inevitable heaviness and sadness of life through the second half of the book, in a way that transcends its initial brilliance for an excessive beauty.

Here, things were neater - Quixano recovered his mind, got sick, and died. The end. But even though we knew he was deceived, crazy, we wanted Quixote to be vindicated, to emerge triumphant. A foolish, quixotic hope, but inherent in my reading of the book. I can't really add much or anything to what has been said everywhere on Quixote and all that attends it. But it took me in with it, and showed its worth and its essence, while being a fantastic journey as well. That it took four years and as many tries may be part of the natural process. Hasta lo'o, you other Quixotes.