Book Burning and the Birth of Modernity: Inside Cervantes’ Don Quixote

Read Don Quixote with me and a community of readers by joining the Literary Canon Club https://www.troubadour.studio/reading...

In this video, we explore the famous (and surprisingly humorous) book-burning scene in Don Quixote—and how Miguel de Cervantes used satire to critique censorship, champion storytelling, and essentially invent the modern novel. Discover how Don Quixote’s clash between medieval ideals and the realities of a sprawling empire remains relevant in our own time of book bans and cultural shifts. Join me in uncovering the timeless lessons of this literary masterpiece!

Topics Covered:

The hilarious yet thought-provoking “book-burning” scene
Cervantes’ life and disillusionment with chivalric ideals
The birth of the modern novel form
Why Don Quixote still matters in our era of censorship
How stories shape personal identity and cultural values
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Transcript

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Who could ever find a book burning funny?

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This is what Miguel de Cervantes does in Don Quixote,

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one of the most celebrated novels in Western literature.

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In an early chapter, our hero Don Quixote is lying in bed at home, almost dead.

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Really,

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while his friends, a priest and a barber, sit in his library, going over which books they're going to save of his of Don Quixote and which books they're going to throw away and burn.

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And yet, Cervantes turns this dark moment into a kind of humorous satire on the whole idea.

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Now, if you haven't read Don Quixote, don't worry at all. I got you. But all you need to know at this moment is that our protagonist has lost himself in chivalric romances. And we'll talk about that in a minute. These are knight in shining armor tales that have all but rotted his brains as his friends, his niece, his housekeeper say.

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Determined to cure him, his friends and family host

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a bizarre procedural, a book burning,

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and they pass judgment on each of these books and sometimes throw them onto a pyre or keep them. And why they keep some and not others is part of the humor of this whole scene.

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It's part trial, part roast, literally and metaphorically, and it's all outrageously done. Some of the humor comes from the fact that the priest, for instance, doesn't want to get rid of one of the pieces because it really brought him lots of pleasure and enjoyment. While the barber wants to keep a particular piece because it brought him something, and then they pass judgment on some because it didn't fill the Castilian language properly, and they're at the same time making fun of.

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Remember, Cervantes is writing this, a writer in the late 1500s, making fun of and ridiculing much of the literature of that day that was available and revering others. So as a way for cervantes to kind of show his own appreciation while in a more deep way give an evaluation of the world that they actually live in. And this is an important part of the splendor order and what Cervantes is bringing into the world with Don Quixote.

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And my argument, along with others, is that Cervantes, in a very important way, not only invents the novel, but modern civilization, modern thinking that goes along with it. He demonstrates it in his greatest novel, Don Quixote.

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also this shows some clues as to things that people at this era were considering and thinking about, for instance, and, and these are things that are relevant to our own times today. For instance, who decides which stories get preserved and which gets silenced?

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How does your personal reading experience shape your identity?

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I'm just got to have it aside here and say, this is the whole point of Troubadour Studio and the Literary Canon Club, which you can join by going to troubadour Dot studio and go to the literary canon Club. And there's a link below and join and read through the great canonical. That's the shaping literature from Homer to Ayn Rand.

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You can go all through that with us and me, and I will help guide you through this, give you motivation, and help you through this. If you've ever picked up a great book saying, I want to read this and then put it down, daunted, overwhelmed, and you didn't finish it.

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Don Quixote is the book we are reading at the beginning of 2025. So I highly recommend you join us and try this with a community of readers. Dedicate it to reading the great canonical works.

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I'm also going to touch on a really important theme that will cover in our discussions if you join us. And that is what happens when an empires grand narratives stop making sense to ordinary people.

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So in the following lecture, we're going to explore how Cervantes uses the seemingly absurd concept of a book burning comedy to hint at something bigger.

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This happens at the beginning of the novel, after Don Quixote is first. Very brief. Sally. That is, outward adventure or misadventure into the world as this new reinvented man, Don Quixote, a knight errant going out to save the world, protect damsels and, you know, be a good,

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knight helping the world,

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write injustices.

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It shows in the story of the book Burning Man and Don Quixote.

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A world, a European and a Spanish world caught in transition from medieval loyalties to a sprawling modern empire, a society torn over what ideals to uphold. And the individuals like Don Quixote, struggling to reconcile old romantic dreams with the dark, stark realities of this ever changing world. By the end, you might just find yourself wondering what books you'd save from the fire

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and how their stories shaped you.

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Before we get into the book burning scene, we need to learn a little bit about chivalric romances. And this excerpt expands, empire. So chivalric romances versus clashed with an ever expanding empire.

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Chivalric tales come out of an era when the world is already starting to expand. The Western world, that is, they're starting to solidify into more of what we might call today nations.

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so you have France, you have Britain, you have Spain. You have places like this that are starting to unify and to, hey, look, all these people in this island over here, what we call today, the United Kingdom, they all kind are many of them speak kind of a similar language.

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And we have this character, this man who wrote a story,

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a series of story,

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Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales that kind of are in the vernacular that many people can understand and hear. That's what's unifying all of them is this unified language. And these stories, as these stories developed and for instance, in Geoffrey Chaucer, which,

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you know, he's telling stories like A Knight's Tale, we start to get broad themes that each of these territories, some of them have in common but are slightly unique and telling something about that culture.

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So El CID in Spain, Charlemagne and France,

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King Arthur in Britain. And these are revered throughout all of Europe. People in Spain will like, you know, will appreciate much of the Arthurian legend. But they also have their own legends. Chivalry is a code of conduct

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The idea of chivalry was to bridge this gap between this real,

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burgeoning world of unifying people and give,

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the people, including the knights and the or the men in armor, a purpose

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to help that culture improve. So just as an example,

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Yvain the Knight of the lion is told by a Frenchman by the name of Chretion de troy. He's telling.

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two men with armor, essentially. So some men with some means and some power and some ability to do some things in their life in the sense of doing good or doing ill to the people around them and having great,

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negative or positive effect and trying to help codify their behavior.

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So that they will be beneficial to the land that they are living on. So, for instance, one way to think about this is at this time in the this is the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries, the if you were a peasant in England, in France, in Spain, anywhere really, and you're in a little town, you know, you know, a couple hundred people, maybe a couple thousand people, and there's a church,

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Maybe there's some little things where you could, you know, barter or buy some food, go back home, work the land

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there's a lord nearby. You might see your lord if you were to see at this time a band of,

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knights or men in armor coming into your town or through your town.

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Maybe they stopped there for a while. This would have given you lots of fear. You would have been terrified by this. Even if they, you know, had banners and things that were, you know, you are associated with. That's part of your land that you're on, that wouldn't matter. They would be terrifying. And think about it. You know, these are big guys.

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They come from money. They they have some ability to defend themselves. And, you know, they know how to kill that often. They probably have killed. And they're going around others doing what they want. They take the women they want. They take the food they want. Nobody can really stop them,

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without, you know, garnering an armed army and going after them.

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So they don't they usually get their way. Well, one thing that was developed were these stories of chivalry to say, this is how you behave as a knight, and this is what you want to model yourself on and go based on and have these types of,

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of ideas and adventures. And you should do this in the name of a woman, for instance.

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And this is where the origins of courtly love that have shaped the way that we think of love to this day. Same thing with these behaviors. Rather than doing, you know, ill in the real world, be like this Yvain the knight of the lion, who through an act, a series of actions, he goes out and he serves the people.

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He helps people, he saves damsels in distress. And then he's awarded with great fame and honor and love and things of that nature. That's the model that people start to kind of emulate now. How much they actually emulated it or not is a matter of debate and kind of irrelevant. But that's the point of what they're trying to do.

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And it's pretty clear to me that some people did really hold this as a high,

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point of behavior. We could see this today when people are disagreeing and agreeing on, oh, you should be a good conservative, you should be a good Christian, you should be a good this. And you know what those characteristics actually are that happens in our era that certainly happened in the 1615, 14, 1300s.

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So chivalric romances, a famous one in Spain, Armadas de Gaulle, functioned as moral and heroic templates. Here's how to behave,

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depicting, what it should be to be upright and moral.

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Now the problem with this becomes, as the empire grows, there's a distance between the reality of the chivalric codes and fighting for them and the,

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the, the codes themselves. So there's a distance between these two things of the ideal that you're supposed to be fighting for, dying for living for,

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virtuously, for that you might have for, you know, the people with men,

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with armor and the others that are just the realities.

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If you go out there, you get maimed, you get harmed, you get, you know, you get imprisoned and,

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Alger and then you come home if you ever make it home and you see that people don't really appreciate it, you don't have,

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honors and accolades, and you're actually ending up in prison, and indebted and bad things are happening not only to you, but the people you care about who also went out and you saw your friends give their lives for this empire.

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Now, that's very different than what existed before. So to recap a little bit of this briefly. You have the sense of expanding empire where the individual within the empire. So the Spanish Empire in the late 1500s, for instance, the middle 15, it's the biggest empire in the world at this time, with territories in Africa, throughout Europe and major territories in the New World, what we call America today.

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you have an individual in this who will go out on the seas, let's say, and fight Barbary pirates or, you know, Turkish pirates and maybe win a battle through heroism and, and maybe lose the functioning of his one of his arms and gets shot several times in the chest, but somehow miraculously lives and survives just to come home and be captured by Barbary pirates and taken to Algiers to be ransomed.

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After five years of hard labor, and then come home to

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finally get home to your homeland. And nobody cares. It seems like, or it seems like very few people care. You don't have, you know, accolades of the sky. You're not rich. You're not wealthy. You don't have beautiful women everywhere. It seems like you're actually worse off because of it.

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So in one sense, you have a whole set of ideals that you've been living on and,

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and embodying and emulating and working towards your whole life and saying, this is how I'm going to behave. And when the time comes, you do behave that way. And then when you get home, the reality is

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you're just another number in this massive

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empire.

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And that's the clash that starts to happen in the 1550 or in the 1500s, going into the 16 and, and 1700s. And so you get this clash of you have these high ideals of how to behave. But then the reality is they don't actually pay off. That's what starts to happen.

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So that man, that hypothetical guy that I was talking about who loses his,

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functioning of his arm, who acts heroically, who does many things that would have shown him to be an ideal knight in the way that he was taught. Was Miguel de Cervantes

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in 1571 he fought in the Battle of Lepanto, and here he, although he had a fever, and he was below deck, and his commanding officer would allow him to sit this battle out.

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Cervantes refused to stay below deck. He insisted on fighting on the galleys prow, which was actually the most dangerous part of the battle. And,

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because he believed it was his duty to be valorous and a good knight,

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During the heat of the battle, he was shot three times, two in the chest and one in the left arm. And he would say he lost the use of his left hand for the greater glory of his right.

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In 1575 to 1580, he was held captive,

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in Algiers, which was not a good place for a Christian to be captive. But he was lucky that he kind of came from some money, or at least he appeared to. It's not really true that he came from a lot of money. He came from a little bit. He was what was called a Hidalgo, which means the son of someone, basically.

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So just means some. It's the lower gentry. It's the basically the first entrance of like a new middle class we can think of. So he wasn't a poor peasant, but he had no real money or access to money.

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After he was eventually ransomed and returned home, he,

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continually throughout the rest of his life dealt with financial struggles, really dying in poverty.

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as Cervantes got older. And he was in these financial troubles. I believe that there was a little bit of a disillusionment, a little bit as maybe not quite strong enough.

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There was a disillusionment to the actual reality of living based on these high ideals and just the day to day reality of life. He would think that he would have great honor and respect and wealth and riches and beautiful women and all the awards that a great warrior would have. But he didn't. Now, I'm not going to say this for sure.

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I'm not a soldier. Today I would talk to some, you know, veterans and see how they feel about this. Is this a universal trait or is this a universal trait in that it's modern? Maybe this wasn't the case hundreds or thousands of years ago. It's definitely not portrayed at all up, or at least not much until Don Quixote.

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You don't see this in the Iliad and the Odyssey. You don't see this in ancient Greco-Roman literature, and you don't see this in Beowulf. Like if you're a warrior, you do that, you act a certain way, and that's a good thing. And you same thing with these chivalric tales.

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In my view, Cervantes does not completely become disillusioned with valor. He still respects valor, but he begins to satirize and have problems with the reality of how the valor that he believes should be upheld and should be honored by people is actually treated in the real world. And as we get into Don Quixote itself, the story, we start to see what don what Cervantes is really trying to accomplish here.

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So now let us turn to the book burning scene. So we have this world where we have,

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chivalric tales that are being told there. They are now being published in book form that people can own.

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this is something I did not mention before, but think about the Gutenberg,

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press in 1440.

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This is a little over 100 years later. So at this point we're starting to get books that are binded and put together and sold at, for the time, relatively cost effective ways. And before the Gutenberg press, only a really small fraction, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage. You know, the real 1% of that era could read, write, and own any of the scrolls or books that they had at that time.

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So books existed, but not in the movable print era in the same way where they could be much more mass, quote unquote, mass produced, not mass produced the way we can today. But compared to before, definitely much more mass.

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Now let's think about what a book burning is. So it seems pretty clear. It's. It's the idea that we don't want you to read these books.

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Why would somebody want or not want someone to read or not read a book? Well, that would imply that there is something in those books of importance and that the people reading them might be inspired, motivated, changed to do something based on what they read in those books.

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If you are a deeply Christian or Muslim person, for instance, you may want people to only read the books approved to help you act more like a good Muslim or a good Christian. That would make sense if you want people to act that way. If you want people to act like a good,

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you know, Protestant German in the mid 1900s, you might want to burn books that are a little too,

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heretical to that, to maybe Jewish,

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to outlandish to foreign, to whatever it is, though that's the idea behind a book burning.

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Now, they didn't really have book burnings before. There were massive amounts of books. And what they would have is maybe burning of a library like the Library of Alexandria, or even the ostracize izing of a author or a popular person that people were listening to at the time.

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for instance,

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Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor after the fall of the Roman Republic, banned and ostracize Ovid because Augustus

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wanted to promote the moral ideals of marriage and staying in a marriage and not having adultery, not having all these affairs and orgies and things of that nature.

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And Ovid was writing about love and how to seduce women and and have frivolity and fun and things of that nature and that, you know, Augustus and like that. So he ostracized them. Now, sometimes you might just execute them. Augustus was pretty decent in the sense that he didn't he didn't kill this particular poet. But that idea has gone throughout the ages.

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But when we start getting into the Gutenberg press now, your era, now what you're getting is more books.

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Published at a quicker pace

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so that people can print out books and send them around and pass them around from one person to another person. And that causes a problem for the people in authority who may want to only have one kind of story that props them up in power, like the King is great, and this is the best king, and anything that gets in the way of that might be problematic for the the development or the power that they're trying to hold.

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If this sounds familiar, it should seems like it still happens today, as we have lots of discussions about the importance or not importance of the freedom of the press.

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so what we have in the book burning scene and Don Quixote, as we have,

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Don Quixote himself lying almost dead because he got it is had to become a knight errant. He donned a spear, he put on a shield, he put on a little rusty helmet,

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and some other armor that he had.

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He's an. And keep in mind, he's a middle aged or an old man. This is in the 16, hundreds of his late 50s, I believe. And he, he,

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names his horse Rocinante And, you know, it's really just an old nag, and I can barely stand up. And he goes out on some adventures. They don't go very well for him, but he acts like the men.

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The knight in shining armors that he reads about in his chivalric books, and it ends up where he is interacting with a mule driver, a bunch of mule drivers, and they get in an argument about the beauty of Dulcinea, the woman that,

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Don Quixote has said he is enamored to, and he has given all his love and adoration to.

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This is another chivalric knight thing to do. When the mule driver says, I don't know if she's beautiful, maybe she's got poor, you know, something coming out of her face or something Don Quixote takes a great offense to this. And he charges. The man Rocinante the old nag falls over, Don Quixote is on his back and the mule drivers just come over and beat them almost to death until they're too tired to lift their hands.

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And then they walk away. So Don Quixote goes home, and his friends are really worried about him as they might be. And why are they worried? Because he's gone mad with these. This belief in becoming a knight errant.

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Now, let me read a few passages from this book burning scene to help you get a sense of what Cervantes is demonstrating and his observations about the world he's living in.

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quote. The priest asked the niece for the keys to the room that contained the books responsible for the harm that had been done, and she gladly gave them to him.

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All of them went in, including the housekeeper and they found more than 100 large volumes, very nicely bound, and many other smaller ones. And as soon as the housekeeper saw them, she hurried out to the room and quickly returned with a basin of holy water and a hyssop, and said to the priest, take this, senor, listen, and sprinkle this room, so that no enchanter the many in these books can put a spell on us as punishment for wanting to drive them off the face of the earth.

00:22:59:05 - 00:23:30:18
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The licentiate had laughed at the housekeeper's simple mindedness, and he told the barber to hand him the books one by one, so that he could see what they contained, for he might find a few that did not deserve to be punished to the flames. So think about what we're seeing here. So we have a housekeeper, a person of the a peasant essentially going to a priest, a learned man, and telling him alerted men at 1605 and telling him, we need to be careful because we might be enchanted by some mystical power.

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So sprinkle this Holy One. And the priest says, no. So the priest says, not so. You know, if you're a believer in these things, why would you not believe in that? So all of a sudden, we have this weird inverted thing where the person who's supposedly believing in these mystical, otherworldly things is saying, no, no, those doubts don't be so simple minded.

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Well, this is a big shift in the world now. So these enchanters don't exist. They're not real. They're they're at least according to the priest who should believe in these things. So you would think he might.

00:24:03:20 - 00:24:10:14
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now, when they get to some of the books, they start to go through them. I'm not going to go through all of them, but I want to give you an example of what this looks like.

00:24:10:14 - 00:24:17:18
Unknown
The priest says this one seems to be a mystery, because I have heard that this was the first book of chivalry printed in Spain,

00:24:17:18 - 00:24:21:03
Unknown
and all the rest found their origin and inspiration here.

00:24:21:05 - 00:24:31:10
Unknown
And so it seems to me that as the proponent of the doctrine of so harmful a sect we should, without any excuses, condemn it to the flames. No, senor, said the

00:24:31:10 - 00:24:39:12
Unknown
barber, for I've always heard that it is the best of all the books of this kind ever written, and as a unique example of the art, it should be pardoned.

00:24:39:14 - 00:24:59:11
Unknown
That's true, said the priest, and so we'll spare its life for now. Let's see the one next to it. It is, said the barber, the exploits of asplandian who was the legitimate son of amadis de Gaulle. And truth, said the priest, the mercy shown the father will not help the son. Take it. Senora. Housekeeper, open that window.

00:24:59:11 - 00:25:04:10
Unknown
Throw it into the corral, and let it be the beginning of the pile that will fuel the fire. We shall set.

00:25:04:10 - 00:25:06:13
Unknown
On and on and on they go.

00:25:06:13 - 00:25:35:02
Unknown
If that made you think of some kind of weird tribunal. That's correct. At this time there existed a tribunal by the Spanish Empire called essentially or in paraphrase, the Inquisition, thousands would die from the Inquisition. And this would kind of be the process. What standard did they have? We don't know. They probably didn't know either.

00:25:35:04 - 00:25:53:22
Unknown
Now, this I think, is part of what Cervantes is parodying He's parodying and giving a kind of ironic twist to this whole scene where you have these, this men and men in power, the priest who's not believing in something mystical, though a simple minded,

00:25:53:22 - 00:26:05:22
Unknown
housekeeper, actually believes in these things, and she wants to save her friend. But the priest is more concerned about other issues, like which one has is a better sense of the Castilian language.

00:26:05:22 - 00:26:13:20
Unknown
The Spanish language of that, the dialect of that region. And that, I think is a big part of what's going on in this scene and in the book overall.

00:26:13:20 - 00:26:38:23
Unknown
And unfortunately, we still see to this day not book burnings as much, but book bannings quite a bit. In 2021 and 2022, 1500 books were banned from various schools throughout the United States. This is a problem, in my opinion, because it's again a demonstration of the idea of who gets to decide which books are good and which books are bad.

00:26:38:23 - 00:26:40:20
Unknown
Not now. I want to read,

00:26:40:20 - 00:26:49:10
Unknown
another passage from the scene to give you another important lesson here. This comes from the niece, Don Quixote, his niece.

00:26:49:10 - 00:27:01:22
Unknown
And she says, quote, you should know, Master Nicholas. That's the barber, that it often happened that my dear uncle would read these cruel books of adventures for two days and nights without stopping.

00:27:02:00 - 00:27:19:16
Unknown
And when he was finished, he would toss away the book and pick up his sword and slash at the walls. And when he was very tired, he would say that he had killed four giants as big as four towers, and the sweat dripping from him became because of this exhaustion, he would say was blood from the wounds he had received in battle.

00:27:19:18 - 00:27:42:13
Unknown
And then he would drink a whole picture of cold water and become cured and calm again, saying that the water was a precious drink brought to him by the Squiffy the wise, a great wizard and a friend of his. But I am to blame for everything, because I didn't let your graces know about the foolishness of my dear uncle, so that you could help him before it went this far,

00:27:42:13 - 00:27:48:20
Unknown
and burn all these wicked books. And he has many that deserve to be burned, just as if they belong to heretics.

00:27:48:20 - 00:27:54:11
Unknown
in addition to another example of heretics and the burning of heretics and the burning of ideas and,

00:27:54:11 - 00:28:19:07
Unknown
books and models of living that the people in power may or may not agree with. What we see there is reading books as catalysts to change. That's really what becomes problematic for people, for the people in power in the past, it's really kind of easy or easier to control the quote unquote narrative

00:28:19:07 - 00:28:25:11
Unknown
that is the set of stories that a given people in a given region can all abide by, can all

00:28:25:11 - 00:28:41:21
Unknown
live with, and can all kind of adhere to. So in Greece you have canonical works of Homer. And again, what you might have is people reading Homer, and you can control what they're listening to a little bit more, because you don't have the this advent of,

00:28:41:21 - 00:28:48:01
Unknown
mass publication where lots of people can have access to all of these works, or at least some of them.

00:28:48:03 - 00:28:55:19
Unknown
And so, you know, for instance, there would be many less people, bards or readers of Homer and let's say the 300 BC,

00:28:55:19 - 00:29:03:12
Unknown
that could go around and read the story to people. Then there would be in 1600, Spain who might be able to buy,

00:29:03:12 - 00:29:17:13
Unknown
a Don Quixote or chivalric Armadas de Gaulle story, go to a tavern and read it to the locals every day, which is something that would happen, is we'd have actual people going to taverns and reading these stories, and you have more of them doing this, and they could just get a copy.

00:29:17:15 - 00:29:23:11
Unknown
And then if you could read, you could even borrow that copy yourself or get a copy from someone else, or if you could save up, you could buy it.

00:29:23:11 - 00:29:47:20
Unknown
The book Don Quixote and this scene kind of illustrates the role of imagination. So the way that it's portrayed is he reads these books and then he thinks that what he's doing is fighting these giants, that he's the sweat from his brow is actually blood. So it's a kind of, there's an abstraction or there's a, there's so it's a, there's this concrete thing, this giant.

00:29:48:00 - 00:30:00:11
Unknown
And then there's the reality. There's the, the, you know, metaphorical world, and then there's the reality world. There's a real world and there's a clash between them because it's not real. It's causing him some kind of pain. So they think,

00:30:00:11 - 00:30:04:16
Unknown
and that's what why you should read the book to kind of learn a little bit more of Cervantes' view.

00:30:04:16 - 00:30:17:22
Unknown
What Cervantes does and Don Quixote is he pioneers the modern novel. Before this, the tales told by almost everybody except maybe Shakespeare

00:30:17:22 - 00:30:24:04
Unknown
But the tales told by pretty much everybody in these ballads, the chivalric tales are of,

00:30:24:04 - 00:30:27:08
Unknown
men and women acting in a very,

00:30:27:08 - 00:30:42:11
Unknown
cohesive way with the the way the world works. In other words, they are just these very abstract models of valor, of chivalry, of honor, of truth telling, of uprightness, of whatever

00:30:42:11 - 00:30:44:00
Unknown
that the writer had envisioned.

00:30:44:00 - 00:31:04:18
Unknown
what Don Quixote accomplishes is it gives you the interiority of this man, Don Quixote, as well as his interactions with other people like Sancho Panza, his sidekick throughout most or all of the novel. And you get a sense of the wholeness of him as a person, including,

00:31:04:18 - 00:31:08:15
Unknown
the thoughts that he has against about why he's doing these things.

00:31:08:15 - 00:31:10:16
Unknown
His motivations, and,

00:31:10:16 - 00:31:32:00
Unknown
the, the challenge he has of trying to live this life in a world that doesn't seem to be adhering to these values. And you get great speeches, great, you know, interior discussion of his character, but and interior thoughts sometimes told by this narrator who is able to give you this full picture

00:31:32:00 - 00:31:40:22
Unknown
that is the beginning of the modern novel is you have a narrator who's giving you his subjective feelings on a subject, for instance, the book burning scene.

00:31:41:01 - 00:31:53:08
Unknown
He's giving you the concretes, and he's also giving you narrative, telling you some of his thoughts and views about this picture that he's painting. That's not something you would get much of, if any, prior to this

00:31:53:08 - 00:32:08:15
Unknown
And the role of humor and satire in this is that by laughing at book burning, by laughing at the silliness of the priest and the barber, saying yes to this book, no to that book, and why they say, oh, because I really liked that book. Oh, it brought me some pleasure from that book. I don't want to burn down,

00:32:08:15 - 00:32:11:15
Unknown
that one, you know, didn't have a satisfying ending.

00:32:11:15 - 00:32:14:05
Unknown
Throw that one in the book. Like having those kind of personal

00:32:14:05 - 00:32:27:09
Unknown
shows. When you laugh at it, it shows you how ridiculous is the system that you're living in and the system that, you know, has all of those things in it. You said, now that's that. You know, I've seen people do that. That's ridiculous. I agree, that is silly.

00:32:27:09 - 00:32:32:10
Unknown
Now, this novel in 1605 would go on to inspire all the novelists that go for it.

00:32:32:10 - 00:32:53:03
Unknown
Fielding's Dickens, Dostoyevsky, the modern creators of the novel, the way we think of it, where you have usually a flawed protagonist like Don Quixote, who is going out into the world and figuring out what's, you know, the at issue, at odds with his ideas, his views, his perspective, and the world that he's actually living.

00:32:53:03 - 00:33:14:17
Unknown
And the lived experience of the world in that clash tends to be what the whole structure of every novel is, including modern mysteries, romances, and any story that you see today. It's very rare that you're going to get a complete, simple model like Superman, for instance. Who is he is a kind of callback to this.

00:33:14:17 - 00:33:23:05
Unknown
The comic books are a callback to these more straightforward, just emblematic model templates that don't really have interiority.

00:33:23:07 - 00:33:30:18
Unknown
And the way that they just are in the way that they act, they just do, and they just are upright. They just do represent Kansas, you know,

00:33:30:18 - 00:33:36:13
Unknown
Midwestern American values. But they had the super power behind them because maybe they represent America

00:33:36:13 - 00:33:45:14
Unknown
And the American military might. But you know what directs them so that they're actually acting in a good way rather than in a bad way, or be like Superman, be like,

00:33:45:14 - 00:33:46:03
Unknown
Spider-Man.

00:33:46:03 - 00:33:49:22
Unknown
With great power comes great responsibility, like those types of, you know,

00:33:49:22 - 00:33:58:21
Unknown
models. That is chivalry style. It's not a summary in the same way as it was in the 12th century, but it's the same kind of style of a template.

00:33:58:23 - 00:34:13:05
Unknown
Although in today's world and today's movies, in comic books, they do input a little bit of the interiority into these characters, which again, is comes from this tradition that Miguel de Cervantes really,

00:34:13:05 - 00:34:14:07
Unknown
popularized.

00:34:14:07 - 00:34:19:15
Unknown
in Don Quixote. We see a character that's trying to deal with these high ideals,

00:34:19:15 - 00:34:29:07
Unknown
like chivalry, like honor, like living in valor, being courageous, righting wrongs, being a man of justice and what that means to them and the real world.

00:34:29:07 - 00:34:51:16
Unknown
That doesn't seem to coincide with this, at least not anymore. And he's trying to integrate and deal with it, and he clashes with that at all times, sometimes getting beat up by mule drivers, sometimes tilting at windmills all the time in a jocular, fun way, in the style of the writer trying to show you the humor in these moments, although there are also moments when they're not funny.

00:34:51:18 - 00:34:56:07
Unknown
And that is the beauty and the wonder and the splendor of this story.

00:34:56:07 - 00:35:26:13
Unknown
I would be willing to bet. If you're listening to this, you have a bit of a romantic spirit as well. And that means you might go chasing after windmills. You might be chasing after high ideals. And even if you think those ideals are correct based on reality, there's still might be something about the way you chasing them that clashes with the success of your actual life, and how they're not actually matching together that you think this is how things should be.

00:35:26:15 - 00:35:27:20
Unknown
This is the reality.

00:35:27:20 - 00:35:46:17
Unknown
I'm doing what I should be doing, but things still are not working out that I think would describe a lot of people today. And for hundreds of years since Miguel de Cervantes own time. And that is what is being captured in this beautiful, wonderful, humorous, exciting tale and series of tales,

00:35:46:17 - 00:35:48:06
Unknown
about Don Quixote.

00:35:48:06 - 00:36:06:04
Unknown
And it's important for you to start thinking about what books shaped your reality. And are you willing to read other books to help expand and improve your mind and your understanding of the world? Because that's the great pleasure, joy, entertainment?

00:36:06:04 - 00:36:22:01
Unknown
Enlightenment education of a liberal arts education that is reading the great canonical works of Western literature. And this goes back to my original question of how could anyone find a book burning funny?

00:36:22:03 - 00:36:48:18
Unknown
And Don Quixote, the priest and the barber set out to cleanse Don Quixote his mind by destroying his chivalric romances. If they can't help sparing the ones they themselves enjoy or admire, their cure becomes an ironic tribute to the very stories they claim to reject, and a testament to the fact that books are too magical, too influential to simply cast into the flame.

00:36:48:20 - 00:37:08:17
Unknown
This moment captures the essence of Cervantes's profound contribution to our modern era by showing how even censors cannot resist the pleasures of reading, he reveals the unbreakable hold that's that books and stories have on our imagination and our moral compass. Today,

00:37:08:17 - 00:37:17:06
Unknown
And the act of burning. The characters reaffirm just how vital books are in shaping who we are and how we see the world.

00:37:17:06 - 00:37:46:13
Unknown
In short you could try to eliminate unwanted ideas. But if even the censors can't resist saving the works they personally cherish, then books and the modern mindset they inspire remain unstoppable. That's the genius of Don Quixote. Cervantes not only birthed the modern novel, he reminds us that the written word in book form, printed in the mass media, for all of our qualms about this whole mass media idea or experience

00:37:46:13 - 00:37:48:12
Unknown
that it made us who we are

00:37:48:12 - 00:37:50:21
Unknown
and continues to light the path forward.

00:37:50:21 - 00:38:06:18
Unknown
not only did Cervantes invent the modern novel, he helped to really define and invent modernity. And that's what this is, is the struggle over information or the struggle over power to control the information. How do you do that?

00:38:06:18 - 00:38:11:00
Unknown
What taste are able to do that? And then how do the individuals living within those

00:38:11:00 - 00:38:27:05
Unknown
societies contend with, grapple with the stories that are being told to them? That is modernity. That is what we live in today. And now we live in this mass media culture that, you know, has this,

00:38:27:05 - 00:38:42:05
Unknown
ever expanding and ever challenged ideas of how we're going to survive, flourish, live in, and understand the world that we actually live in and our individual place within this massive global empire that we now live in.

00:38:42:07 - 00:38:56:16
Unknown
That is Cervantes. So I hope that you will try to read Cervantes for yourself, that you will go through the book with me or on your own. And this is the one that I'm reading with our group. This is by Edith Grossman.

00:38:56:16 - 00:39:06:17
Unknown
I hope that you'll give it a shot. I think what you'll find are humorous tales, stories of really interesting character and characters like Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.

00:39:06:17 - 00:39:10:08
Unknown
Some of my favorite parts are their conversations together. But,

00:39:10:08 - 00:39:27:03
Unknown
you know, when they're disagreeing with each other, trying to understand each other in some way. And I hope you will really try to go through this and understand it for yourself, because in doing so, I believe you will really become able and better able to understand the world that you inhabit now.

00:39:27:05 - 00:39:29:12
Unknown
So get out there and read a big book.