Your source for jobs, books, retreats, and much more. Faith The Good Word. Terrance Klein November 14, The events fade from memory, but not their meaning. The notary was there at the time, and he said that in no book of chivalry had he ever read of any knight-errant dying in his bed so calmly and so like a Christian as Don Quixote, who amid the tears and lamentation of all present yielded up his spirit, that is to say died.
How do you want your life to end? However they might close, how we live those lives, the cares and concerns that we choose, determine their meaning. Now ask yourself.
If you were given the date of your death, if it were far closer than you thought, how would you chose to live? What would change? What must yet be done? Given a little time, how would you write the close of your story? I want to confess and dictate my will. I realize my folly and the danger into which my having read them has placed me. Now, by the grace of God, and having learned by my own experience, I abominate them. When the three heard him say this, they believed that some new craziness had overcome him.
Collect your senses and stop this folderol. Leave these jests aside, and find a confessor so I can confess, and bring a notary to prepare my will, for in such critical moments as this one, a man ought not to trifle with his soul.
The priest made everyone leave, and he stayed behind with don Quixote and confessed him. The bachelor went for the notary and came back a short while later with him and with Sancho Panza. Sancho, who had heard news about the state of his master from the bachelor, found the housekeeper and niece in tears, and he began to whimper and weep himself. On his second expedition, Don Quixote becomes more of a bandit than a savior, stealing from and hurting baffled and justifiably angry citizens while acting out against what he perceives as threats to his knighthood or to the world.
Don Quixote abandons a boy, leaving him in the hands of an evil farmer simply because the farmer swears an oath that he will not harm the boy. Don Quixote witnesses the funeral of a student who dies as a result of his love for a disdainful lady turned shepherdess. He frees a wicked and devious galley slave, Gines de Pasamonte, and unwittingly reunites two bereaved couples, Cardenio and Lucinda, and Ferdinand and Dorothea.
Believing that he is under the force of an enchantment, he accompanies them, thus ending his second expedition and the First Part of the novel. Everywhere Don Quixote goes, his reputation—gleaned by others from both the real and the false versions of the story—precedes him.
As the two embark on their journey, Sancho lies to Don Quixote, telling him that an evil enchanter has transformed Dulcinea into a peasant girl. Don Quixote meets a Duke and Duchess who conspire to play tricks on him.
As nothing that is man's can last for ever, but all tends ever downwards from its beginning to its end, and above all man's life, and as Don Quixote's enjoyed no special dispensation from heaven to stay its course, its end and close came when he least looked for it.
For-whether it was of the dejection the thought of his defeat produced, or of heaven's will that so ordered it — a fever settled upon him and kept him in his bed for six days, during which he was often visited by his friends the curate, the bachelor, and the barber, while his good squire Sancho Panza never quitted his bedside.
They, persuaded that it was grief at finding himself vanquished, and the object of his heart, the liberation and disenchantment of Dulcinea, unattained, that kept him in this state, strove by all the means in their power to cheer him up; the bachelor bidding him take heart and get up to begin his pastoral life, for which he himself, he said, had already composed an eclogue that would take the shine out of all Sannazaro had ever written, and had bought with his own money two famous dogs to guard the flock, one called Barcino and the other Butron, which a herdsman of Quintanar had sold him.
But for all this Don Quixote could not shake off his sadness. His friends called in the doctor, who felt his pulse and was not very well satisfied with it, and said that in any case it would be well for him to attend to the health of his soul, as that of his body was in a bad way. Don Quixote heard this calmly; but not so his housekeeper, his niece, and his squire, who fell weeping bitterly, as if they had him lying dead before them.
The doctor's opinion was that melancholy and depression were bringing him to his end. Don Quixote begged them to leave him to himself, as he had a wish to sleep a little. They obeyed, and he slept at one stretch, as the saying is, more than six hours, so that the housekeeper and niece thought he was going to sleep for ever. But at the end of that time he woke up, and in a loud voice exclaimed, "Blessed be Almighty God, who has shown me such goodness. In truth his mercies are boundless, and the sins of men can neither limit them nor keep them back!
The niece listened with attention to her uncle's words, and they struck her as more coherent than what usually fell from him, at least during his illness, so she asked, "What are you saying, senor? Has anything strange occurred? What mercies or what sins of men are you talking of?
My reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of ignorance that my unhappy constant study of those detestable books of chivalry cast over it. Now I see through their absurdities and deceptions, and it only grieves me that this destruction of my illusions has come so late that it leaves me no time to make some amends by reading other books that might be a light to my soul.
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