A sorry privilege!
Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. "Then let him
not make the demand," it will be said, "let him resign himself, let him
accept life and truth as they are." But he does not accept them as they
are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho, who stands by his
side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those
understand who talk thus to him, those who succeed in resigning
themselves and accepting rational life and rational truth. No, it is
that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows!...
And in this critical century, Don Quixote, who has also contaminated
himself with criticism, has to attack his own self, the victim of
intellectualism and of sentimentalism, and when he wishes to be most
spontaneous he appears to be most affected. And he wishes, unhappy man,
to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he
sinks into the despair of the critical century whose two greatest
victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches
the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that intellectual Don
Quixote who escaped from the cloister--and becomes an awakener of
sleeping souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican
said of himself--he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those
superior natures who are called insane (_insano_) not because they do
not know (_no sanno_), but because they over-know (_soprasanno_).
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