d I believe that the
soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the
Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution--learning from them,
yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the
spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark
Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle
between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance which was the offspring of
the Middle Ages.

And if some accuse me of subserving the cause of Catholic reaction,
others perhaps, the official Catholics.... But these, in Spain, trouble
themselves little about anything, and are interested only in their own
quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they have neither eyes
nor ears!

But the truth is that my work--I was going to say my mission--is to
shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in
affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and
this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all
those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to
agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and
passionate desire.

Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the
immediate apparential efficacy of his work? It is very doubtful, and at
any rate he did not by any chance put his visor to the test by slashing
it a second time. And many passages in his history show that he did not
look with much confidence to the immediate success of his design to
restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter to him so long as thus
he lived and immortalized himself? And he must have surmised, and did in
fact surmise, that his work would have another and higher efficacy, and
that was that it would ferment in the minds of all those who in a pious
spirit read of his exploits.

Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic
ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self
to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's
battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul
to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure
of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho, at his
side, inward and heroical too--and tell me if you find anything comic in
the tragedy.

And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left
himself, and a man, a living