Get It?

The hypermodern lessons of "Don Quixote"

Adrien-Louis Demont, “Don Quixote” (1893)

For most of my life, a shocking number of the crucial choices I’ve made about who I spend my time with have been guided by a very particular inner dialogue, a conversation with myself which always culminates in the same, singular question:

Do they get it?

A mutual infatuation with the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History sparks a new friendship? He gets it. A blind date goes south when she starts complaining about the immigrants ruining Spain? She doesn’t get it.

I haven’t been alone. My late teenage years coincided with what, in retrospect, appears to have been the apotheosis of the Millennial Internet’s cultural relevance, a period when the implicit question, “Do they get it?” centered every relationship, critique, and news story of the day. Local high school football coaches put rivalry aside to raise money for a Turkey Trot? They get it. State Senator lounges on beach while teachers strike for equitable pay? He—obviously—doesn’t get it. I was startled, just a few weeks ago, to read a pundit of a recent Los Angeles Lakers trade cap off his analysis with a sigh of relief: “Finally, the Lakers get it.”

What exactly is it, you ask? Excellent question.

It is both completely obvious and entirely unknowable. You know it when you see it, but—more importantly—you especially know it when you don't see it. It is a vague elixir of self-awareness, charity, and kindness. But also, crucially, a lack of seriousness. The kind of person who gets it—not to mention the kind of person who considers the world in terms of whether other people get it—maintains a certain attitude of nonchalance about the state of things. Their heart’s in the right place, but they carry with them at all times an implicit understanding that somehow, by virtue of some elusive guiding force, the jig is up. They care about others, but somewhere not so far from the surface those who get it understand that, while there may be a series of specific, consequential subjects in the world, the vast majority of life simply isn’t that serious. Except, of course, for those obvious subjects within the singular worldview that are.

All around me, esteemed compatriots of the Internet—mods, avatars and eggs—have filtered their judgments through the same lens, by deploying the same question, without ever being quite sure of its actual meaning. With one exception, of course: anyone self-aware enough to frame the world through the lens of getting it must, themselves, get it.

Get it?

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Does Don Quixote get it?

For those afflicted by the compulsion to filter the unknowable span of human existence into this singular question, the quandary is perhaps the most seminal in all of modern literature.

To a certain sort of observer, the answer is an emphatic, unequivocal, thundering no. Any casual reader of Miguel de Cervantes’ two-part opus (an admittedly rare distinction in 2024), written over two distinct stretches in the early 17th century, would almost certainly concur.¹ The book’s titular protagonist—the character who has almost rotely come to be known as the trailblazer of modern literature, shaped every Spanish-language book which succeeded it, and attracted so much fame as to warrant a neologism in English which might supersede the notoriety of the original work itself—is, after all, the epitome of a man who does not get it.

His exploits may be familiar to you. Alonso Quijano, a lowly, middle-aged hidalgo in the dry, empty heart of Spain, becomes so enamored by the chivalric romances he spends his days reading that he decides to change his name, hire a squire, and hit the road in search of adventures himself.

Delusion quickly reveals itself. Don Quixote mistakes windmills for giants. Don Quixote slaughters a roaming herd of sheep on the mistaken pretense that the animals are in fact a threatening army. Don Quixote, stripped to his underpants in the middle of the night, slashes an inn owner’s stash of wineskins, feverishly taking them for enemies in a half-asleep daze. Don Quixote is crazy.

As I traveled throughout Spain in the fall, I received a torrent of theories diagnosing Don Quixote’s behavior (all from people, by the way, who have never read the book; apparently I’d have a better chance of locating the protagonist’s elusive love interest, the enchanted Dulcinea del Toboso, in Toboso, in 2025, than I do of finding a Spanish person who’s actually read “Don Quixote” cover to cover). Don Quixote is bipolar. He’s a madman. He’s on mushrooms (duh).

I found it difficult to argue with these assertions as I dutifully flipped my way through Cervantes’ work, meandering through España Vacía, peering out dusty windows, imagining the knight and his squire scaring off shepherds, bickering over dwindling rations, looking to the stars. Then I arrived at the halfway point of book number two. There, a single quote—one line of dialogue—took my breath away.

Don Quixote, fresh off sitting through his squire Sancho Panza’s eloquent recounting of a recent experience soaring through the atmosphere on the back of a wooden horse named Clavileño (part of an elaborate setup executed by a good-humored Duke and Dutchess the pair meet on the road), pulls his loyal assistant aside and implores him to agree to a truly strange arrangement. The knight errant had himself just endured a similarly unbelievable ordeal: a trip through the time-warped, castle-filled, enchanted Cave of Montesinos, where Don Quixote claims to have been regaled by a sorcerer named Merlin over three days and nights. Sancho Panza, who, from outside the cave, clocks his master’s time gone at just over an hour, is skeptical of the knight’s story from the beginning. So, after Sancho wraps up his own whimsical tale, Don Quixote turns and whispers into his squire’s ear:

“‘Sancho, since you want people to believe what you saw in the sky, I want you to believe what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. I say no more’” (765).

The line made me stop in my tracks, squint, re-read the quote once, twice, three times. Was I really reading what I thought I was reading? Don Quixote, né Alonso Quijano, allowing the shadow of a doubt over his own identity to creep into his yet-unperturbed mind? Until this point—three quarters of the way through my thousand-page copy of the book—Don Quixote had stayed true to his identity, not belying for an instant his belief in the magical world he claims to inhabit. Suddenly he seeks the reassurance of his bumbling squire (of all people!) to validate his life’s mission? It’s the first sign of the protagonist’s slow slip out of delusion, away from insanity, towards far more treacherous territory: logic. It’s the first clue that Don Quixote may, in fact, get it.

The multitude of such discoveries, the depth and richness of the lessons to be learned, still, 415 years later, from Cervantes’ novel, are a mere component of the truly delectable experience that is reading “Don Quixote” for the first time in 2024. The revelatory joy of experiencing such a work is such that it’s nearly impossible to entirely parse out its sheer effervescence, its continual defiance of expectation even in the long face of its canonical status. From prose to character, stylistic experimentation to uncanny plot twists, this is perhaps the richest text ever written.

Ultimately, though, it’s the timeless themes of “Don Quixote” which buoy Cervantes’ reputation even today. More tightly written, surprising, funnier, and inclusive works have been published since. But perhaps no book better encapsulates, through each of its components, the singular potential of the novel, the form’s unique ability to directly confront the predicament of its own existence.

This, above all, is why “Don Quixote’s” anointment as the world’s “first modern novel” is so well deserved. The book’s narrator is all-knowing, ironic, self-reflexive; he’s happy to laugh at himself, wink at the reader, and burn the entire history of a particularly rote genre to the ground…in the very style of the genre he is so intent on excoriating. While that reading certainly underplays the relatively revolutionary aspects of “Don Quixote”—the protagonist’s age, the cementing of the “bumbling sidekick” character (poor, poor Sancho Panza), the explicit portrayal of poverty, the countless, winking meta-layers stacked throughout the tome—the thing which essentially keeps the reader engaged with “Don Quixote” is the fundamental delight in the adventures of this very peculiar knight errant. The meta elements are delicious garnishes, but fundamentally the hook which engages the reader—exceptional storytelling—is the same in “Don Quixote” as it is in the chivalries it’s lambasting. It’s a madness, a total absurdity, that as a reader I was on the edge of my seat for Cervantes’ entire 40-page digression into “A Tale of Inappropriate Curiosity,” a total break from the main action of the novel which follows a doomed and wholly tangential fictitious love triangle. But a good story is a good story, and no possible distraction could have steered my attention away from Cervantes’ digression at the moment I read it, despite how utterly nonsensical, in any traditional sense, the story is in relation to the rest of the book’s plot.

Enlightenment—a movement whose history is incomplete without Cervantes’ inclusion—was excellent at stripping away the veneers previously shielding the many teetering levels of scaffolding precariously holding society together. It was less adept at telling us what to do about all the new, scary information it unveiled, at providing a guide to threading the needle between its intractable contradictions: science and the unknowable, probability and God. This paradox plagued the prime movers themselves (think Galileo begrudgingly recanting heliocentrism in the face of the Pope), and, for his part, Cervantes’ own biography appears at first glance a contradiction. One of the central tensions of “Don Quixote” is how socially conservative its core values appear (a group I met up with in the north of Spain ran out of English books on a recent trip, so I had the hot idea of having a friend read “A Tale of Inappropriate Curiosity” aloud as a bedtime story one night, and, well, let’s just say being the guy who recommends the author who favorably compares the precious chastity of a young woman with an ermine fleeing a group of trappers to preserve its virginal white fur, as a casual bedtime story, without context, in a room full of women, might be inadvisable for anyone desperately clinging onto girly pop solidarity) amidst such bold stylistic experimentation.

This disparity has led many to falsely presume Cervantes was some sort of covert agent, surreptitiously subverting the church, because of the implausibility, faced with the audacity of his writing, of his near-certain true identity: a God-fearing, institution-crutching, patriarchy-upholding war veteran trying to scrape by as a writer amidst an early 17th century context unimaginable to most every contemporary western artist. For many, this discovery reveals a disappointing reality—how much more scintillating might the book’s backstory have been had the author of such a structurally subversive work been engaged in literary tradecraft, each dash of the quill an act of sabotage against the sleepy, repressive establishment?

In truth, though, the “contradiction” of Cervantes’ traditional role is so fitting as to itself deserve an extraneous, overdone aside in his own masterpiece. For what better exemplifies life amidst present western modernity than living with a full awareness of the snares—psychological, scientific, sociological, epistemological—inextricably trapping us within contemporary existence, yet, for an elixir of countless inscrutable, dancing impulses, falling victim to them anyway; acknowledging the frivolity of sport while painting your face Dodger blue, hating all men while relentlessly trying to hook up with one, self-consciously chasing the eggs no matter how much you understand, in your prefrontal cortex, how chimerical they actually are. Giving up religion but still believing in something. The act of burying oneself inside “Don Quixote” is as much a submersion into an electric field of sparkling, skull-busting prose as it is an admission of that irreconcilable tenet of cognitive science: awareness of bias does not spare one from falling victim to it.

When Don Quixote ultimately capitulates to reality in the book’s finale, all those who’d at first worked tirelessly to free the protagonist from his delusion—his priest, his cousins, the reader—find ourselves suddenly begging him to remain in la la land, to carry on in the universe of giants and washbins-as-helmets and magical caves; to fight on another day.

“Now that we’ve had news, Don Quixote sir, that the lady Dulcinea has been disenchanted, you come out with all that?” says Sansón Carrasco, a local student who’d months earlier dressed up as a knight errant and battled Don Quixote himself in a doomed effort rid the protagonist of his delusion, to the dying, and now apparently sane, hidalgo. “Now that we’re on the point of becoming shepherds, to spend all our time singing and living like lords, you want to turn yourself into a hermit? Stop it for goodness sake, and come to your senses, and forget all that idle nonsense” (977).

The motley crew around Quixote’s deathbed begs the main character: be a knight errant, be a shepherd, be whatever you want to be, so long as you keep the magic alive. Recent devotees to the religion of getting it find ourselves on our knees, inexplicably praying for the protraction of an obscure Spanish farmer’s fever dream. The very definition of sanity is flipped on its head as we realize that delusion in this world is no longer a symptom of queer divergence; it’s a means of survival. We strain to elongate Don Quixote’s dream, but really we’re fighting to extend ours.

Reading Don Quixote’s sly admission to Sancho Panza about the Cave of Montesinos, his breathless acknowledgement of his own fallibility, was perhaps the most shocking moment I’ve ever encountered in literature. Might the steadfast protagonist actually be living a lie, aware of precisely how ridiculous his exploits appear to the outside world? How can one live with such delusion?

Then you take a step back, look up from page 765 of a book that’s consumed a month of your life, the second part, one in which a man pretending to be a knight because he’s read so much about them is having a conversation with an admirer who himself is aware of the knight’s exploits only because he, somehow, read about all of it in the first book, and suddenly an opus dedicated to thrashing the genre of chivalry has spawned a generation of kids running around in suits of armor, both within the fictitious universe of the book and in real life, and you think, “Oh, shit.” Four hundred years later, I’m not really sure what the joke is—or who, exactly, is telling it—but I’m positive that, their universe being the same as ours, it’s being played on me.

1. I read John Rutherford’s Penguin Classics translation.