Don Quixote Ventures Forth Once long ago at night I was excited by rain lighting the street for murder. Was it too late, I wondered, to do something stupid with my life? Perhaps I was going to die myself one day? Looking into the future was like breaking open a thermometer. I wanted to go…

Lowry at The Sylvia “… he knew how to act, and I how to write: we were destined for each other.” — Don Quixote de La Mancha “Perhaps Don Quixote wouldn’t have hesitated so long. . . . A character for whom I’ve the greatest respect by the way.” — The 1940 Under the Volcano…

Something More “Thou must take notice, brother Sancho, that this adventure and those like it are not adventures of islands, but of cross-roads, in which nothing is got except a broken head and an ear the less: have patience, for adventures will present themselves from which I may make you not only a governor but…

Alberto Manguel In a certain Spanish prison cell, in a town whose name we cannot remember, in Castro del Rio perhaps, or in Seville, a tired scholar and soldier, almost in his fifties, conceived of a man in his own image, a man more ridiculous and more courageous than himself, a man decided, against all…

Quixote For Real after Allen Ginsberg Came home, found Quixote in my living room. It’s happened, I said to myself in the silence. The light seemed subtly altered. I have Quixote in my house, and all my eggs are fried. Called my mother on speed-dial. Quixotic! she screamed. I took in his drooping moustaches, his…

Loving Don Quixote Even now I love you, gentle Knight of the Rueful Countenance, because I have always fallen most deeply in love with vulnerable men — —not losers exactly, but dream-led searchers, driven by a mad need to excel— boldly pursuing glory in second hand clothes or— like my father, who left school at…

Marcela Sonnets after Don Quixote i “I was born free, and to live free I chose the solitude of the countryside. The trees of these mountains are my company, the clear waters of these streams are my mirrors; and to the trees and waters I reveal my beauty.” You chose this, this loneliness and green…