#quixotically

[thingsdavidlikes]

Quietly by nlwirth

[foundfamilynonsense]

Had a dream where mini golf was added to the Olympics. And one of the Olympic mini golf athletes lost the gold because she hit the windmill.

And she tweets with a picture of the windmill and the caption “bout to go through my Don Quixote phase” and honestly I think that’s the funniest thing my brain has ever come up with.

[apricops]

So, the thing about Don Quixote.

The thing about Don Quixote is that he tilts at windmills - tilts in the archaic sense of ‘charge at with a lance,’ because it’s the story of a guy who read so much chivalric romance that he lost his mind and started larping as a knight-errant. He was, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, chivalrybrained.

The thing about Don Quixote is, sometimes people take it as this story of whimsical and bravely misguided individualism or ‘being yourself’ or whatever, and they’re wrong. If it took place in the modern day, Don Quixote would absolutely be the story of a trust fund kid who blew his inheritance being a gacha whale until his internet got cut off so now he wanders around insisting that people refer to him as ‘Gudako.’

But the real thing about Don Quixote is that it was published in the early 1600s, and the thing about the 1600s is that Europe was one big tire fire. This is because 1600s Europe was still organized around feudalism (or ‘vassalage and manorialism’ if ya nasty), which assumed that land (and the peasants attached to it) were the only source of wealth. And that had worked just fine (well, ‘just fine,’ it was still feudalism) for a long time, because Europe had been a relative backwater with little in the way of urbanization or large-scale trade.

That was no longer true for Europe in the 1600s. The combination of urban development, technological advances, and brutal Spanish colonialism meant that land was no longer the sole source of wealth. Sudden there was a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners, and another new class of downwardly-mobile gentry who simply couldn’t compete in this new fast-paced economy. Cervantes saw this process with his own eyes.

One of the symbols of this new age was the windmill, a complicated piece of engineering that was expensive to build but would then produce profits indefinitely - in other words, a windmill was capital.

The thing about Don Quixote is, when he tilts at windmills, he has correctly identified his nemesis.

[hawyermota]

[officialmiintee]

haunting

[alleesaur]

merry go round and round and round

[luv4lain]

really fast quixote

[oneirows]

Second Kindred’s dream

[gremio0]

the dream goes on

[swingstep]

this sad wet cat has bewitched me mind and soul

[thelostpretzel]

bitch i mean beach volleyball

[fnyafnya]

241006

[kellllerrs]

don don don donqui don qui-xote

[quinnonimp]

limbus company brazil trip but i only draw doninha & dandan

[officialmiintee]

again, and again, and again

[alleesaur]

scrungly papercraft don carousel