Today’s word, quixotic,” is taken from the name of the hero of Cervantes’ 1605 novel with the themes of chivalry, romance, and sanity, “Don Quixote.” A quixotic person is someone who is idealistic, romantic, and impractical, often chasing lofty goals that are unlikely to succeed or even doomed to failure. My post today is the tale of a quixotic man who ultimately succumbs to the harsh realities of the real world.
He carried mornings like banners, unfolding them in crowded streets as if light itself would listen. He believed in levers hidden in kindness, in tolerance, in altruistic human nature, in speeches whispered to strangers, in the quiet geometry of change.
His pockets held plans sketched in pencil, smudged but fervent, maps that bent the world toward mercy. He spoke often of turning tides with nothing more than stubborn hope and a refusal to look away.
People smiled at this quirky, quixotic man the way they do at weather that promises rain that never arrives. But most doors closed with polite finality. Numbers did not bend, systems did not blush, and time proved less patient than he imagined.
Promises he made to himself and to anyone who would listen echoed in smaller and smaller rooms. They said he was tilting at windmills, overly optimistic and naive. Even the sky seemed indifferent, its vastness offering no reply.
Still, he pressed forward, his threadbare optimism stitched to his days, until the thread itself began to fray.
In the end, he folded his banners, not in defeat exactly, but in recognition that the world was not clay in his hands, but stone, and he had been trying to shape it with nothing but breath.
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Ten months after the initial stay-at-home order was issued, we are again told to leave home only when essential.
In my A to Z Challenge post yesterday, I wrote about pragmatism and described myself as a practical pragmatist, someone who is guided by practical considerations, someone who self-describes as a logical, rational, and reasonable person.
The word “quixotic” is taken from the name of the hero of Cervantes’ 1605 novel with the themes of chivalry, romance, and sanity, “Don Quixote.” Quixote dreams up a romantic ideal world, which he believes to be real, and acts on this idealism, which most famously leads him into imaginary fights with windmills that he regards as giants, leading to the related metaphor of “tilting at windmills.”
Facts, Fictions & Fantasies 