Quixote, de la Mancha

At Harvard, late 1967, in a lecture on “The Riddle of Poetry,” Borges said of the Historia del hidalgo ingenioso Don Quijote de la Mancha:

“The word hidalgo has today a peculiar dignity all its own, yet when Cervantes wrote it, the word hidalgo meant ‘a country gentleman.’ As for the name ‘Quixote,’ it was meant to be a rather ridiculous word, like the names of many of the characters in Dickens: Pickwick, Swiveller, Chuzzlewit, Twist, Squears, Quilp, and so on. And then you have ‘de la Mancha,’ which now sounds noble in Castilian to us, but when Cervantes wrote it down, he intended it to sound perhaps (I ask the apology of any resident of that city who may be here) as if he had written ‘Don Quixote of Kansas City.’ You see how these words have changed, how they have been ennobled. You see a strange fact: that because the old soldier Miguel de Cervantes poked mild fun at La Mancha, now ‘La Mancha’ is one of the everlasting words of literature.”

If this were an essay, Borges would be underestimating his readers here, perhaps, since they would likely know some of these things if they were reading Borges. But the emphasis makes sense in a lecture at Harvard. And that peculiar dignities can grow from the once ignoble is a good point to remember.

On a different subject, then, “The Riddle of Alcoholism,” the word drunk can come to have a peculiar dignity all its own, like a healed wound or the well-told drama of how it came about. In the color of context, it can be tinged with humor, sadness, the absurd. So there is always the danger that it can come to mean something other than what it meant when you were just a drunk looking for a way to stop drinking. At meetings you can hear the funniest things, as well as the saddest, and many things in between about what it is to be a drunk. But most people do not forget - and work at not forgetting - exactly what it meant when alcohol had the better of them. Maybe it helps that every so often a new Don Quixote de la Mancha, or Kansas City Doña, walks through the door, quite exhausted, to rest on a chair set out for the purpose.