My singing has been known to reduce grown bagpipers to tears.
First-ever recorded case of middle-life crisis?
Of course he’s fictional, people. But the fun in this sort of thing is to try and diagnose him anyways. People do it all the time. Sherlock Holmes is said to possibly have ADHD, for example.
It doesn’t matter that it’s not the point of the story any more than it matters that wrong information about how airplanes work is not the point of an airplane movie. This sort of playing around with fiction is just for fun.
That said, I’ve never seen or read the work in question, so I have no idea. Based on what was said, I’d say the closest would be some sort of schizophrenic disorder causing a break from reality.
Maybe it was some sort of large tardation
In Man of La Mancha, Cervantes is depicted, at one point, giving the following monologue. I think the last paragraph really covers the question in the OP. After all, how do you judge someone to be mad, when he is surrounded by a society that is madder than he himself appears to be?
*“Life as it is. I’ve lived for over forty years, and seen life as it is. Pain, misery, cruelty beyond belief. I’ve heard all the voices of God’s noblest creatures, and moans from bundles of filth in the street. I’ve been a soldier and a slave. I’ve seen my comrades fall in battle, or die more slowly under the lash in Africa; I’ve held them at the last moment. These were men who saw life as it is. Yet they died despairing. No glory. No brave last words. Only their eyes filled with confusion, questioning why. I do not think they were asking why they were dying, but why they had ever lived.
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness; to surrender dreams, this may be madness; to seek for treasure where there is only trash… Too much sanity may be madness! And maddest of all — to see life as it IS and not as it SHOULD BE!”*
I thought Richard Kiley, from the original, sang the definitive version of The Impossible Dream.
Until I heard the revival with Brian Stokes Mitchell.
(Not responsible for any swooning that occurs while hearing this.)
Oooh, that’s good.
Well, bugger. I guess I’m done for, then.
“A couple of medieval songwriters come up with the idea of chivalry one rainy day… and you embrace it as a lifestyle. You live and die by a code of honor that was trendy when you were a kid” -Methos, Highlander
I think we would have to define those ideals [of Chivalry] before I can completely buy into them. And I used to embrace them as best as I could until that line, and other things, really got me thinking about them. But that’s for another thread.
Back on topic, I like the quote from Bob, in terms of Don Quixote, of “seeing life not as it IS but as it SHOULD BE.” But for me, I think that making the world a better place is a good ideal but I think DQ goes too far in that what he seems to want would be too much change for society all at once. So, maybe, in the end, he’s too much of an idealist?
And I loved the episode of Quantum Leap with Bakula singing several of the songs from it as well as how they framed his leaping out with this one. That one gets to me.
Sanity is democratic. What ever the majority thinks is sane, is, in fact, sane.
:dubious: That’s silly-entire cultures have been known to go collectively noodles. Nazi Germany, anyone?
But they weren’t insane by their own standards. And really, they weren’t truly “insane” by the standards we use today. Sure, they were barbaric, but to me part of their awfulness is that they did so while sane.
By Western psychiatric standards, it’s literally true, since the DSM definitions define psychosis to exclude beliefs that are in keeping with the patient’s societal norms. So while a WASA like me might be called crazy for seeing ghosts, a Haitian voodoo practitioner would not be if they were in the context of his or her religious beliefs.
Alonso Quijano becoming delusional because his brains dry out from an excess of books and a lack of sleep is just a quick plot device to get the story rolling. OTOH right today we have a lot of people who go around convinced of Illuminati plots, chemtrails, truthism, birtherism, imminent racial war, etc. So people can get badly kooky from too much bad input.
Some people’s vision of Don Quixote as a total celebration and endorsement of pure idealism may be more of a Romantic-Age reading. Cervantes lived hard enough to see both sides: partly, as ralph mentions, there is a theme that too much of the Establishment/nobility was NOT embracing Renaissance ideals but rather a vision based on “the glory of old times” and seeking adventure and easy wealth as Conquistadores or in European wars; *but also *there is the element of how many of the would-be “realists”, like the ungrateful prisoners in the first book or the Duke’s household in the second book, were not engaging in any productive progress either but were content to just live it up at the expense of others’ pain.
Even in the middle of the Golden Age, Cervantes could see that outside the palaces the commoners were still left down and out and the lesser gentry like Alonso Quijano were on a downhill slide, with nothing left but longing for the old glories. The Chivalry Novels were to a great degree a reaction to the more prosaic society emerging with the Renaissance (when Quijano’s family ask the cleric and barber to destroy his library, they actually stop and review the books and pick out some that have actual literary worth, while pointing out which others are tripe).
In the book we see that while on the one hand longing for a glorious fantastic ideal by itself gets you nothing but repeated beatdowns, OTOH the supposedly “realist” aproach taken by the ruling class of Cervantes’ Spain, of getting yours and who cares about the others, of choosing to live easy off the wealth attained by those you scorn for being your lessers and getting their hands dirty, while being protected by sucking up to the favor of those in power, is not a worthy alternative (and they are morally inferior to Quixote and Sancho who at least are honest and sincere). You need to be realistic about what is actually happening in the world so you can try to do real good deeds instead of having a windmill kick your ass, BUT you must have firm ideals and a moral compass, so you can do what is right and if there is a wrong to be redressed you should be able to do so, or at least not abuse those who try to.
Not Don Quixote. Not even genuine Cervantes, as far as I know. It’s from the play Man of La Mancha, a fictionalized account of Cervantes in a prison cell with a bunch of lesser criminals, who he gets to perform a play-within-a-play based on a modified version of his story of Don Quixote. At some point in the outer layer of the story, one of his cellmates criticizes Cervantes for his imagination and idealism, telling him that he needs to deal with “life as it is”, to which Cervantes replies with the monologue that I quoted.