The greatest joke in literature also happens to be its greatest tragedy. Don Quixote, an aging gentleman from La Mancha, has read so many chivalric romances that he loses his grip on reality and decides to become a knight-errant. He dons rusted armor, renames his nag Rocinante, and rides off into the Spanish countryside to revive chivalric virtue, thrashing windmills he believes to be giants, mistaking brothels for castles, declaring a peasant girl his fair lady Dulcinea del Toboso. His long-suffering squire Sancho Panza, a farmer of plain wit and endless patience, accompanies him not out of belief but out of loyalty, or perhaps because Quixote's madness reveals truths that sanity conceals. Together they bicker, reconcile, get beaten up, and stumble through a world that cannot decide whether to laugh or weep. Cervantes understood something essential: that we all construct our own realities, that stories shape the world more than facts, that the person who sees what isn't there may also see what everyone else misses. Four centuries later, this novel remains a mirror held up to every dreamer, every idealist, every person who has ever insisted that the world should be better than it is.
