), and it
is despair and despair alone that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad
hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to have been said, rather than
_credo_.
And Don Quixote, who lived in solitude, sought more solitude still; he
sought the solitudes of the Pena Pobre, in order that there, alone,
without witnesses, he might give himself up to greater follies with
which to assuage his soul. But he was not quite alone, for Sancho
accompanied him--Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the
simple. If, as some say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives,
then we are saved, for Sancho, his master dead, will become a
knight-errant himself. And at any rate he is waiting for some other mad
knight to follow again.
And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who
journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote--it is not certain that he died,
although some think that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance
and believing in the truth of all those things which his dying and
converted master had denounced and abominated as lies. But neither is it
certain that the bachelor Sanson Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber,
or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these that the
heroical Sancho has to contend.
Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude.
And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers, creating for
ourselves a Quixotesque Spain which only exists in our imagination?
And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to
_Kultur_? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing! It is a
whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole esthetic, a whole logic, a
whole ethic--above all, a whole religion--that is to say, a whole
economy of things eternal and things divine, a whole hope in what is
rationally absurd.
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