imagine

Throughout the reading of Don Quixote part II, i am constantly feeling bad for Don Q and Sancho as they are over and over again belittled and ridiculed. It dawned on me then, that these two are not the ones to feel sorry for, instead i should be feeling sorry for those that insult them. For, the way i see it now, Don Quixote and Sancho, while they suffer constantly, are some of the happiest people there could be for one reason: they still have their imagination.

Now that its getting to be the holiday season, there are all sorts of old movies flying around, and old books and ideas come to mind. The major theme that is re-introduced during the holidays is the focus on children, on the "magic" of the holidays. There are countless stories of the children pushing for their parents to regain their imagination, it is always the grumpy dad that is unable, but something inevitably comes along to change that.

When ever i think of Christmas i always think of Norman Rockwell (this is why i chose the painting above) and when ever i see some of Rockwells work i am drawn back into my childhood, his work had an amazing quality of nostalgia (i suppose that is the pure appeal) but i can remeber quite vividly days just playing in the woods imagining all sorts of things. And to me they were as real as anything.

thats why when read the story of the wooden horse, i did not feel pity for Sancho or Don Q. despite that they were burned and all sorts of other bad things. Instead i envy them for possessing that power.

This brings to mind a school of Hinduism thats some what drastically different from the other schools: Carvaka. It is roughly the idea that the only true things, are what we experience first hand. The second we leave a room, the room no longer exists for us because there is no proof of it, there is no room once we have left it. roughly following the same line of logic, for Sancho and Don Q. the only reality is at the moment it exists.

this also can be correlated with Walter Pater's idea that, in life,"Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time" I can read this as, while some, like the ones who criticize Don Quixote and Sancho live their lives to disprove. Or more depressingly they live their lives to criticize -the waste their time here, they waste the only life they have. While others like Sancho and Don Q. live their life in poetry, happily. (more or less). or as Pater goes on to say, "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end."

there is a little poem from a Carvaka text, that while it may not comletely mesh with these ideas, it does a good qauint job at it. :

While life is yours, live joyously;

None can escape Death's searching eye:

When once this frame of ours they burn,

How shall it e'er again return?