Don Quixote

Look, you’re often going to feel like life is meaningless. Maybe you’re right. But don’t give up.

Like Quixote, you have the power of your noble heart, and the wealth of your imagination. But you also have your Sancho Paza, to keep you moving practically forward. It all will likely come to a ridiculous end. But that’s okay, so long as you’re laughing at yourself along the way.

It is funny. We’re allowed to be funny. We’re supposed to laugh at ourselves and at each other.

It was a gift, a 2-inch thick, 5 lb. gift, that I had no interest in reading because everybody has already read it – the first modern “novel,” the best-selling novel of all time, etc., so it sat for years on an end table where it served two functions: it gave the room a literary cachet, and it was also a good coaster for coffee cups and such.

But then for some reason, perhaps guilt, perhaps fate, I flipped it open, read a few lines, and then laughed. I was hooked. It was fantastic, funny, and timeless – not just… show more.

There had to be a choice between this and my other favourite grand classic, Moby Dick, but for me, Cervantes just pips Melville to the post for his sheer, unutterably heartwarming and forgiving consideration of human nature. It's extraordinary how this 400+ year–old novel, one of the very first 'modern' novels has stood the test of time so resiliently, and the answer to that lies, I think in its absolute universality. We can all recognise parts of ourselves in the knight of the sorrowful countenance and his equally heroic squire, Sancho Panza because they are aspects of the same… show more.