ANEW: The Opposite of Don Quixote
Or, Back to the Things We Carry
I count them as I turn my back on writing for a second. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. One is a double. I officially have seven bookcases of books to pack — at some point, I say to myself aloud. It’s a daunting task. In fact, as in an Elizabeth Kübler-Ross-like discernment on death and dying, I am bargaining with this mini-grief about wrapping up my apartment in Manchester — building not only suspense, but wondering: what in the hell did I get myself into?
Why didn’t I just live out of boxes? Eat TV dinners and Costco chicken and call it a year?
Well… that would’ve been (even more) depressing.
I think back to when I first moved to Los Angeles on January 1, 1989, to begin my full-time acting and then teaching career. This past year, I have started writing about those one-suitcase days. I had less than $1,000 in my bank account then, hitting my late twenties hard, ready for those days to be over. I was an artist with some semblance of how to make a living from my art — an actor who also worked as an assistant for my two acting teachers, delaying the inevitable, which was getting solidly out of my Peter Pan days and growing up. Errr… teaching.
Yet, here I am, back in this Manchester launching pad. On the third bookcase, I see a figurine and an etching of Don Quixote. I’ve never actually read Cervantes’ Don Quixote, but the trope — the dreamer — has followed me everywhere. Has framed my life. Has taken up residence in my books. My decisions. My memories. My ambitions.
My eyes water even as I think about beginning the dream again.
Quixote was a thing back in the day. Popularized (again) by Picasso in 1955, his ink sketch of the Don and Sancho Panza was everywhere. It was a meme before there even were memes. There’s even some debate over whether the drawing actually first appeared in 1947, tucked inside a magazine. Either way, Picasso saw something of himself in Quixote — and maybe in Sancho Panza too. The dreamer and the realist, drawn with the same pen.
That duality? That’s where the powers of discernment come in.
As I try to pack up a home I’ve inhabited for more than a year, maybe a whole version of myself, I’m reminded that our lives are shaped not only by the stories we tell ourselves, but also by their opposites. So what is the opposite of Don Quixote in literature?
Maybe it’s Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus; it’s a story I know well, have taught on countless occasions, and re-tell often.
Sisyphus, as reimagined by the French philosopher Albert Camus, is a man who defies Death, but Death eventually collects on Sisyphus’s affront to shuffling off his mortal coil. His punishment? To push a rock up a hill forever. Every time he reaches the top, it rolls back down. Not because he’s delusional, but because he’s lucid. Rational. Aware of the absurdity. And yet he persists.
In other words, Sisyphus is in full command of his faculties when he attempts to outwit fate. Quixote, by contrast, has lost his mind, or at least he has abandoned reason, in favor of windmills, Dulcinea (that sweet invisible girl he thinks he loves), and the grandeur of delusion. His is a beautiful madness. Sisyphus, meanwhile, is left only with a rock to romance rather than a dream. His hard lesson is not the imagined woman. It’s not even a windmill — just the weight of consequence.
So maybe The Myth of Sisyphus isn’t just about punishment. Perhaps it’s a manual for what comes after the dream fails — or ends — or possibly it moves. Maybe it’s about what we do with the books, and the stories, and the beautiful burdens we carry from one stop to the next.
I look at these bookcases, the ones I keep dragging with me from city to city, and I wonder if they’re my own version of the rock. A reminder of what it costs to be educated. To think deeply. To keep dreaming, even when it might be easier not to. Why not lay my burdens down, oh lord?!
The first person from my college who called, asking for a donation from me, didn’t understand my ascerbic put-off, “I’ll give you money when I am ready to donate a library.” He left the call thinking that I was either delusional, like Don Quixote, or an ultra-pragmatist, like Sisyphus. Can’t I be both?
And maybe, just maybe, if they ever inherit these books or get my gift of tens of millions, they’ll find a note tucked inside one of them that reads: Tilting and rolling. Forever yours, BT.
So yes. I have the Romantics. I have Picasso. I have the Existentialists. I have Camus. I have a life I built again and again, being packed away for posterity or a big, huge dumpster.
Or something in between.
Scene.
Side Note:
This is my homage to Amy Reinert, who unravels a story about a time, a person, or a fleeting moment with the greatest of ease. She’s a brilliant writer—and a seer (“see her”)—on Substack and LinkedIn.
Curated listening:
Well, well, well, what do we have here? When dreaming turns big-ish, for me that is, it must be time for Barbra Steisand’s “Everything.” Listen HERE.
Love this Brian. You put into words what I suspect many of us grapple with throughout life... trying our best to do great things, to contribute greatly to this world, while it often feels like pushing a rock uphill. In the end, it seems to me that all most of us can do, is to be present to those we meet in this tapestry of life. Our presence is the one gift we always have the opportunity to give.
I wonder often what will happen to my books ... what I want to happen to them. The academic stuff I'll unload next time we move, whenever that is. I learned what I learned and I'm never going to revisit them.
The "professional" stuff is also not hard. The kids will keep what they want, recycle the rest. Those books (shelves of them) helped me become the person, friend and coach I am. They did their job.
It's the Books I Love that are hard to think about. No one will care for my first editions of Louis May Alcott, the disintegrated first copies of Pride & Prejudice, Caddie Woodlawn, Middlemarch, A Room With A View and others, that I've already replaced but still won't give up. They are part of me. And so, I guess, thinking about what happens to them when I'm gone is inseparable from thinking about being gone, one day, and that's hard.