The Love that Cannot Fail

The longer I live, the more I realize the wisdom of Don Qixote.

He chose to love a woman in the most pure way - blind and totally unconditional, and therefore detached - an ideal he placed firmly on a pedestal. This was a practical way to go about attaining true love, and true inspiration - his muse - and it is purely genius.

First he chose a woman who would never disappoint him. She could go no further down than she was in her station of life or her character - see Sancho's description below.  Then he renamed her and re-imagined her, and brought her to life in his heart. Aldonza was the proxy for the goddess, Dulcinea of del Toboso. Don Qixote must have truly been a sage, to see the irony of letting Dulcinea have life through a lowly and unattractive peasant girl. It is more beautiful. To people around him, the knight-errant was comical, and very insane. I find that his will was that of a god - he chose to create his world, rather than let the world create him.

I am reminded of a short story I heard on a scifi podcast.  I can't remember the name of it, but there was this lonely man in a war-torn world who lived alone with a notebook full of images of women. One day, a woman, a soldier or something, came upon him, and they lived together for a while. She offered him love, or at least sex.  He preferred his notebook, and eventually betrayed her, and she was killed.  I thought he was an idiot. Now, after the passage of time, and the passage of a few relationships, I think the romanticists are onto something. Something eternal, immutable. Something high above the mundane.

From wikipedia:

Don Quixote describes her appearance in the following terms: "... her name is Dulcinea, her country El Toboso, a village of La Mancha, her rank must be at least that of a princess, since she is my queen and lady, and her beauty superhuman, since all the impossible and fanciful attributes of beauty which the poets apply to their ladies are verified in her; for her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from sight such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only extol, not compare." [Volume 1/Chapter XIII]

However, Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's squire, knows Dulcinea well. Her real name is Aldonza Lorenzo, and Sancho describes her as follows: "… I can tell you that she pitches a bar as well as the strongest lad in the whole village… She's a brawny girl, well built and tall and sturdy, and she will know how to keep her chin out of the mud with any knight errant who ever has her for his mistress. O the wench, what muscles she's got, and what a pair of lungs! I remember the day she went up the village belfry to call in some of their lads who were working in a fallow field of her father's, and they could hear her plainly as if they had been at the foot of the tower, although they were nearly two miles away. There's a good deal of the court-lady about her too, for she has a crack with everybody, and makes a joke and a mock of them all." [Volume 1/Chapter XXV]