Don Quixote

In a small village in the region of La Mancha, Spain, there lived a thin, middle-aged hidalgo of modest means. His name was Alonso Quijano, and he had just one vice: reading chivalric romances, stories full of knights, dragons, and damsels rescued from danger, which were all the rage at the time.

He read so much, and slept so little, that his brain dried up, as the book itself says without mincing words. He sold land to buy more books and slowly lost the border between the page and reality. Little by little, he came to believe that all of it, giants, enchantments, duels of honor, had really happened.

That's when he decided to become a knight-errant himself: to ride out into the world fighting for justice, winning fame, and serving a lady, like the heroes of the books he so admired. To any neighbor, it was the fantasy of a lonely old man. To him, it was the most serious mission of his life.

Before leaving home, Alonso Quijano took care of the details: he changed his own name to Don Quixote de la Mancha, because a knight-errant needs a grand name, and dug up an old family suit of armor, patching what was missing with cardboard.

He even gave his horse a new name, a tired old nag he christened Rocinante, a name that, in his view, sounded noble enough to carry a hero. It's the kind of gesture that shows Don Quixote's logic: if the real world isn't grand enough, he invents the grandeur it lacks.

On his first outing, alone and without a squire, he came upon a roadside inn and treated it like a castle, asking the owner, whom he saw as a noble lord, to knight him right there on the spot. The innkeeper, amused, played along and performed the ritual.

Every knight-errant in the books had a lady to whom he dedicated his victories, so Don Quixote needed one too. He chose a neighboring farm girl, Aldonza Lorenzo, whom he had admired from afar some years before, and gave her a more noble name: Dulcinea del Toboso.

The thing is, this Dulcinea practically doesn't exist outside Don Quixote's head. Aldonza, the real woman, never exchanges a word with him in the entire book, and she probably doesn't even know about the role she was handed. Everything he describes about her is pure invention.

It's one of the most revealing moments in the book: Don Quixote isn't in love with a person, he's in love with the idea of having a lady to love, because that's what the knight's script demands. He preferred the perfect fantasy to the flesh-and-blood woman he could have really gotten to know.