he mortal Don Quixote, in dying, realized his own comicness and bewept
his sins; but the immortal Quixote, realizing his own comicness,
superimposes himself upon it and triumphs over it without renouncing it.

And Don Quixote does not surrender, because he is not a pessimist, and
he fights on. He is not a pessimist, because pessimism is begotten by
vanity, it is a matter of fashion, pure intellectual snobbism, and Don
Quixote is neither vain nor modern with any sort of modernity (still
less is he a modernist), and he does not understand the meaning of the
word "snob" unless it be explained to him in old Christian Spanish. Don
Quixote is not a pessimist, for since he does not understand what is
meant by the _joie de vivre_ he does not understand its opposite.
Neither does he understand futurist fooleries. In spite of
Clavileno,[68] he has not got as far as the aeroplane, which seems to
tend to put not a few fools at a still greater distance from heaven. Don
Quixote has not arrived at the age of the tedium of life, a condition
that not infrequently takes the form of that topophobia so
characteristic of many modern spirits, who pass their lives running at
top speed from one place to another, not from any love of the place to
which they are going, but from hatred of the place they are leaving
behind, and so flying from all places: which is one of the forms of
despair.

But Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter,
and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in life eternal, he
has to fight, attacking the modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy
in order to bring in a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic,
contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola, an Italian Quixote of
the end of the fifteenth century, he fights against this Modern Age that
began with Machiavelli and that will end comically. He fights against
the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of mind,
reconciliation between reason and faith--this, thanks to the providence
of God, is no longer possible. The world must be as Don Quixote wishes
it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight with it and will,
to all appearances, be vanquished, but he will triumph by making himself
ridiculous. And he will triumph by laughing at himself and making
himself the object of his own laughter.

"Reason speaks and feeling bites" said Petrarch; but reason also bites
and bites in the inmost heart. And more ligh