Tilting at windmills

My semester with Don Quixote

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind,” writes Cervantes of the eponymous hero of his 1605 novel. Like an overworked UofT student working towards their degree, Don Quixote de la Mancha experiences a pathological attachment to his quest. In the case of Cervantes’ protagonist, an obsession with chivalric romances, full of knights errant and damsels in distress, blinds him to the reality of his existence as a middle-aged nobleman. The seductive pull of well-crafted literature prompts an absurd journey not unlike that of a prospective university student.  

In my first semester at UofT, I was assigned the entirety of Don Quixote, a nearly 900-page beast of a novel that came to define my introduction to university. At once a satirical romp, a tragedy, and a chivalric romance, Cervantes’ novel bore a remarkable similarity to my own academic quest. Both Don Quixote and I were strangers in a strange land animated by dreams of what the future – or in my case, university – would hold. Campus itself was a fairy-tale novelty: high rises, Pizza Pizzas, and subway cars, stone buildings with spires and stained-glass windows promising to disclose every and any mystery to us students. I was itching to find my place within the university, to inhabit a niche that would accommodate both my mind and heart. 

It’s not just the act of reading but the urge to narrativize my young adult life that threw me into a tumultuous first semester. At first, academia appeared to be an intellectual Eden, full of great literature, challenging theories, charismatic professors, and impressive classmates. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by students who were just as passionate about books as I was. They spoke dead languages and perfect French, they had gone on Euro-tours between high school and first year, and, funnily enough, they even owned horses. It is undeniable that a certain class of students exists at UofT that has benefited from an exceptionally privileged academic upbringing, and that those students tend to study the humanities. Like Don Quixote, I was a fraud, a miscast actor without the qualifications to exist in the same environment as my peers. The emotion wasn’t exactly jealousy. It transcended jealousy, as if my classmates were characters better-fitted to the University. Here I understood the genius of Cervantes’ satire: Don Quixote himself does not “fit” within the novel – he has none of the qualifications of a knight errant – and yet he persists despite the odds as Cervantes’ protagonist. 

In the frequently cited “windmill episode,” Don Quixote mistakes windmills for giants, and takes it upon himself to challenge these nonexistent opponents. His skirmish with the windmills has come to represent the act of fighting “imaginary enemies,” and more broadly, Cervantes’ commentary on the consuming power of fiction. Yet, if I claim that Don Quixote is simply a delusional romantic, I am only, by extension, calling myself a fool. In my own classes, I mistook classmates for adversaries. Rather than extending myself to the brilliant individuals around me, I felt threatened by what I considered to be their obvious advantages. Between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after,” I was clueless as to which role I would play during my time at UofT. I wondered whether I would continue to study literature or if I would pivot to some other program. I wondered whether I would achieve the grades I needed to secure my future success, or whether a degree in the humanities would be useful at all in a turbulent world. I still don’t have the answers to these questions, but I’m more at peace with the fact that so much of the next three years is a mystery to me. Through the example of Don Quixote, I embraced what Keats called “Negative capability,” or man’s capacity to “[be] in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Author and critic Milan Kundera remarked that Cervantes’ definition of heroism is the ability to see “the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths, […] to have as one’s only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty” Great fiction has the power to accustom us to that same uncertainty, by presenting infinitely contradictory individual truths and allowing us to choose which representation of reality is closest to the one we perceive.  

Don Quixote isn’t a liar. He’s a dreamer. Maybe Cervantes believes that dreaming is an exercise in delusion when he himself asks: “What is more dangerous than to become a poet? which is, as some say, an incurable and infectious disease.” But maybe he isn’t advocating a cure. If either Don Quixote, a fictional fifteenth-century nobleman, or I, your average English major, have any advice to impart to incoming students, it would be this: resist the temptation to succumb to quixotic visions of what university will be. Instead, embrace the reality that doesn’t fit neatly into a preconceived plot.