The world we wake up to every morning is crowded with bureaucratic nightmares that make everything from renewing a health card to applying for a job a heroic ordeal. Still worse are the megalithic programs superseding them; unrestrained entities, organisations and devices that steal our attention and our data, instruments that writhe around faster than their lumbering counterparts. The world our parents knew, the one they raised us to thrive in, is falling apart by the day, and its disintegration is only accelerating. Crises materialize and quickly give way to others like crashing waves in a storm (which, given our environmental situation, are also going to rear their ugly faces a lot more).

We’re living in a world too interconnected, too chaotic for us to keep up with— much like Don Quixote, the hero of Miguel de Cervantes’s comedy of the same name. W.H. Auden described Quixote as a Christian saint, and Thomas Mann saw his story as a hopeful irony. Don Quixote is uniquely manifold as a narrative, nestled in a parallax that contorts it into unrecognizable shapes depending on which character you take as your vantage point. In one sense, it chronicles the misadventures of a bumbling Early Modern schizo and his gullible sidekick. In another, it recounts the story of a man who denies the decline all around him by laying reality aside and embracing his animating illusions.

This is the difference between Don Quixote as a comedy and Don Quixote as a tragedy: to produce the former, we have to read it from a looking glass set firmly in a concrete reality; to find the latter, we have to imagine the world as the gentleman Quexana sees it. In one case he dies as Quexana in the final pages of the book, where he lays down in bed never to get up again. In another, it’s the moment he, as the knight, loses the filter of romance and idealism through which he’s been looking at the world.

The tragedy follows a Carlylean hero, a knight who disavows the rotting husk of Early Modern Spain and forces the sheen of a lost golden age onto it, taking everybody else with him: Sancho and his family, the Duke and Duchess, and the Priest and Barber. They all, wittingly or not, play along in his game. What’s important about the infectiousness of his antics is that Quixote doesn’t escape into his illusions. They aren’t catatonic dreams; rather, they’re intertwined with the world. His universe is built from pieces of everybody else’s, but moulded to become pieces in a patchwork-like epic. Don Quixote doesn’t daydream of far-off castles in his room, he transforms an inn into one; he doesn’t recall the fictional danger he’s read about in an ivory tower, but truly suffers as he traverses his country. He’s still living in the real world—he’s just imposed his own rosy vision onto it. 

I’m no literary critic, and, even if I were, I don’t think I’d have anything new to say about such a monumental text. You could teach half a Vic seminar on Don Quixote (in fact, I know somebody who does), but that’s not what I’m here to do. What I think, and what I hope I can convince you of, is that Quixote can help us navigate the ordeal of living in this hellworld: he can be as much a model for an active life as he is a subject for a contemplative one.

Like Quixote, we’re living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. Like Quixote’s Spain, the world in which we live has lost the direction it once had. You don’t need to ask anybody if they lay awake at night worried that they’re losing time, drifting endlessly through a world doing the same—it’s common knowledge that we all do. Having lost all ends to work toward for the time being, and having all power to create new ones paralyzed in this abyss, things can seem hopeless.

That’s why I say that to keep going on, we, like Quixote, have to take a leap of faith into an ocean of belief, however insane, and swim away from this mess. Escapism, I think, isn’t named properly: to entertain escapism is to shrink away, not get away; it’s to hide, not to run. When I talk about swimming away, I’m not preaching escapism; I’m endorsing romanticization, which sits on the precipice between delusion and stoic acceptance. What’s needed is to reimagine the world through a kaleidoscope, not look beyond it with a telescope nor too far into it with a microscope. With no other option, we have to believe that what we’re doing is something more than it is, to have faith that we’re part of a project that we might not be anymore.

Quixote imposes the sights and sounds of chivalric adventure onto his life to save it from the shackles of banality. I don’t read chivalric fiction, and in all likelihood nor do you, but the Quixotic form isn’t tied to that. Take it upon yourself to find it and use it to paint the greyscale pieces of reality with vibrant shades of your choosing. There’s meaning in fiction, so squeeze it from the story and lather it generously onto every day. Stay in the world, but colour it with crayons that you pull from stories.

In the entropy of a world moving too fast for anybody to make sense of, the only way to get by might be to self-impose the illusion of bondage to some end—pretend you’re a knight with a mission. In a sea of confusion and shifting sands, the only order and stability we can find might lie in the oasis of delusion.