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Ayesha Dhurue

Don Quixote by Cervantes

The truth is, before reading this book, I used to think about chivalry and its unwavering hope through a vague lens. You still see the “quixotic” effect around you. The term means idealistic, unrealistic, and even extravagant.


Don Quixote by Cervantes

Buy the book: Amazon

While Don Quixote is an adventurous, courageous, and masterful novel. It tells many truths about storytelling that I was unaware of before. You won’t find a novel with such intricately beautiful details. A historical fiction characterized by lies so imaginatively vivid and sincere that, at some point, you’ll have to stop and reconsider whether or not this is fiction at all. Don Quixote’s personal reality and that of Sancho Panza’s felt strikingly non-fictional. Even so, you may mock his unreal yet aggressively visionary ideals and find them titillating, regardless. Believing the protagonist to be childish and delusional. But, at its very core, Don Quixote is a half-finished tale where perception trumps reality. A mind so entranced and immersed in fantasies, in Don Quixote’s case chivalric romances, that in response to such an internal environment one is bound to encounter external validation. Isn’t that what perception is all about anyway? To bridge the gap between one’s internal thoughts and beliefs to the actual reality.


We create, what I’d like to call, an “experience framework” where our reality amounts to the same thing as our thoughts. And still, some of us, label most of our actions as being void of any meaning whatsoever. As if it’s the absence of thought, like a plant deprived of nourishment, that leads astray.

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