RIP Michael. I have been listening to your lectures for many years. Your thoughtful contributions to our world will be greatly appreciated now qnd for future generations. THANK YOU ❤️🙏❤️
This guy’s lectures are absolutely great. All novels, both in the Canon and out of it, whether comic or otherwise, owe their existence to Don Quixote. It is not only absolutely laugh-out-loud hilarious (and Cervantes is not above employing some fart jokes), it is deeply profound, possesses nobility of spirit and, on so many pages, touches the heart. However, Prof. Sugrue calls Don Quixote himself the greatest comic hero in Western literature. In my opinion, that honor is a toss up between Quixote and Leopold Bloom.
After reflecting on this, I found much wisdom. One I would like to share what is about the faculty of the human mind, how we develop logic and don't just rely on instincts. Our cat can hear a sound and run away where human knows what it is based on experience. It really goes to show that in the past, we could never really rely on instinct, and any fantasy would be destroyed.
It's a commentary on the absurdity of holding a dishonorable world to a standard of honor and the delusion of modeling your life after romantic artistic renditions.
What a wonderfully beautiful set of lectures! Absolutely BEAUTIFUL, is the correct word. Thank you for making these available to us. I continue to listen to you, today, in your current lectures and videos on RUclips. Much love.
I remember my first time reading don Quixote, I cried and my heart was broken when he said: "yo fui loco y ya soy cuerdo" and when he admitted what was his real name. I'll never forget you donquixote.
0:29 It’s comical 1:53 Quixote inflates life Dysjunction at center of laughter and pity 🎭 3:52 Living imaginatively 4:48 Panza The World should be as it ought to be Panza - reliable, predictable, comprehensible 5:57 Dolcinea - 6:18 TheEternalFeminine 8:37 Binocular Vision Moral Grandeur Hopeful Inspiring Ponderous and Elephantine 9:58 Digression 10:41 Pseudo-Epic *Average Man -> Living Imaginatively* 11:20 He’s read too many books 📚 12:49 Into The Inn 14:15 Same problems, different understandings of them 15:15 The Windmills 16:30 The Sheep 🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑 18:12 Mambrino’s Helmet 🪖 19:57 Chivalry: Sustains and Demands Acts of Faith 21:39 Challenge of a Virtuous Wife 23:43 Wineskins, no talking to a Knight. 25:04 None of us laugh at Quixotes intentions *Book 2* Quixote Vs The World 26:10 26:56 Keep this delusional man home 27:47 Idealists hurt by their victories as much as their defeats 32:01 Lion 🦁 35:44 The butt of other Peoples jokes, people take advantage of him, Panza gets to rule an imaginary island 🏝 Panza grows in leadership ability 39:03 Squire promotion Knight of the white moon 🌙 victory Don Quixote accepts defeat 39:58 herd of swine 🐷 🐖 🐷 🐖 40:34 Alonzo Ciano 43:54 Pathetic Great Comedians can make you cry too.
I love prof. Sugrue's lectures, and this one in particular gets really close to home as I am a Spanish native speaker and read the Quixote in its original language. I'm impressed by the intuitions he was able to dig up from a translation in English and they really got me thinking. One of the points I don't fully agree is that of our beloved Quixote being an example of heroism. If you are as crazy as him you can't be a hero. I think the virtue the Don Quixote seems to highlight in between the lines is that of an unrelenting friendship with his faithful Sancho. Friendship is a very common Spanish virtue. My two cents.
I think actually the only way you can be a hero is to be truly crazy. Don Quixote has all the virtues of a hero - he is brave, honourable, proud and hard working... although perhaps not very kind. Maybe he is an older type of hero, a crueler type. But it is the society around him that is filled with cynics that prevent him from being a true hero. If only people would accept his help and reciprocate his honour would he be the hero he truly is.
The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza’s who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote’s with a sense for ideals, but mad.” - George Santayana "Sanity" is very much overrated....
This quotation is from Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. I assume prof. Sugrue misspoke and meant mention José Ortega y Gasset as the author of Meditations on Quixote.
Being, as being the kind of being aware of being a human being on earth for a period of time. Human action then becomes an epic of what ought to be vs what is to be. The Imagination v. The Empirical. The epic can only begin when the chaos and order are enchanted in the minds and hearts of human beings.
Don Quixote's death reminds me of that Rob Lowe song,"What's so bad about peace,love and understanding?" .They both have a lot to tell us in our age of cynicism over idealism.
"Apart from its pure alchemical role, the cabala was used in the elaboration of several literary masterpieces, which many dilettantes can appreciate, without however guessing what treasures they hide under the attractiveness, the charm, the nobleness of style. This is because the authors --- whether they are named Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Plato, Dante, or Goethe --- were all great initiates. They wrote their immortal works not so much to leave to posterity imperishable monuments of the human genius, but rather to instruct it in the sublime knowledge of which they were the depositories and which they had to transmit in their entirety. We should judge in that way, apart from the already quoted masters, the marvelous artisans of chivalrous poems, jests, etc. belonging to the cycle of the Round Table and of the Grail; the works of Francois Rabelais and the ones by De Cyrano Bergerac; Don Quixote by Miquel Cervantes; Gulliver’s Travels by Swift; the Dream of Polyphilus by Francisco Colonna; the Tales of Mother Goose by Perrault; the Songs of the King of Navarre by Thibault de Champagne; The Devil as a Predicator, a curious Spanish book of which we do not know the author, and many other books which, albeit less famous, are not lesser in interest nor in knowledge."
This is amazing, I've listened multiple times to his entire series of lectures on Plato, the Bible, and philosophy, but I've never heard these literature lectures before! Do you have his lecture that covers Goethe's Faust? Thank you for uploading! He also does a series on United States history, but I can't seem to find it
He goes go over Faust i listened to it recently fascinating book. It was on my book shelf because I wanted to too finish it but this gave me inspiration to finish the book.
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
I read Don Quixote years ago. Thanks for reminding me of my sympathy and respect for him. But I think Dolcinai was an important character. Her life was changed by him.
If I remember, the deep pathos Don Q inspires also comes from his diminished fortune and the apparent indifference of his wife and children. (The exquisite and unique are always alone.)
Seem Don Quixote, because his victories and defeats are really defeats and illusory victories, seems he is Homeric like Achilles. Seems like Don Quixote would do very well in 2021, where people want to be a hero, just to be a hero and not really taking time to learn what the highest good is.
This was f****** awesome yes very crude statement totally appreciate the breakdown of the story understanding The Narrative the archetypes and what they mean
When you related Don Quixote and the adventure of the wine skins you picked up your coffee cup... next time hide a wine skin in the lectern and pull that out for a drink! 😆
The following is only my reaction, my opinion, no hate mail, please. You love the book, think it the most hilarious, profound thing you’ve ever encountered? I’m happy for you. Enjoy. This is almost certainly the worst book I’ve ever forced myself to finish. It’s a very easy read. It is, however, humongous, hence time-consuming, at the end of which time you end up with nothing. NOTHING. Did I say “nothing”? I should have said - disbelief, exasperation, and rage. I find the assertions that Don Quixote is the first modern novel and, heaven help us, the greatest of all novels, patently ridiculous. For any number of reasons. Let’s begin with the fact that it’s been crafted, no less than most of the junk one finds when one walks into a commercial bookstore these days, to satisfy the demands of a bored middle class. Hence, we’ve got the lowest common denominator factor at work from the get-go. It’s a money-making venture, first and foremost. Intended, above all, to amuse. I would claim it fails spectacularly on that account, since there are no real protagonists, just wax figures upon whom Cervantes inflicts whatever random episodes occur to him. And when nothing occurs to him, well then, he just inserts unrelated stories, of which there are several in Part 1. He’s as bored as we are, apparently. It is said that this novel stands halfway between medieval storytelling, in which the interior world of the protagonist is of no interest, and the modern psychological novel. This seems to me absurd on the face of it, since neither Don Quixote nor Sancho Panza display even a hint of having an interior life. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, in a couple of dozen pages, jumps off the page and into our hearts in a way one finds no hint of in DQ - she displays more life, self-awareness, and humor than our two protagonists manage to produce in 1000 pages of wearisome prose. BTW, re that “prose” - some folks imagine how wonderful the book must be in Spanish. But experts who know the language, including several great authors, have repeatedly said that there’s nothing remotely special about Cervantes’ use of language - the story’s the thing. Which story is that? Oh, you mean the 1000 pages of disconnected, psychologically unmotivated anecdotes with no over-arching narrative arc? Oh, I see. Gotcha. And then there is the issue of what drives the whole novel, what makes it “funny” or “entertaining”, which, for me, it is decidedly not. Two jokes - Quixote’s madness, never explained - not a shred of psychological insight is offered into what drives it other than he has read too many bad novels and chivalry, and Panza’s penchants for puns and the stuffing of his face, the former of which seems to have dramatically increased in Book 2, for no discernible reason. So - the reader is expected to sit back and continue to laugh over the course of 1000 pages over what? - what are ultimately, are two very feeble, unfunny “jokes”, ugh. It’s not a novel in any sense, by my lights. It has no narrative arc - it begins after the central event has already happened, Q’s descent into madness, without any psychological insight into its genesis. It goes nowhere, can go nowhere - it is a series of basically unrelated episodes, the order of which could easily be re-arranged without anything whatsoever being lost. That is to say, it has the form, more or less, of a TV sitcom. Nothing connects one episode to another other than the supposedly hysterical character flaws of the two main characters. It doesn’t rise to anywhere near the artistic level of the best TV sitcoms, e.g., the 1960’s Addams Family with John Astin and Carolyn Jones. It resembles it in that there is one disconnected episode one week, followed by another the following. It differs from it in this essential - Morticia and Gomez’s love is palpable, even moving. They are recognizable Homo sapiens, of flesh and blood, and we are touched by their love. There is nothing in this “novel” that is remotely moving. How could there be? Its principals are puppets, mannequins. Then it is claimed that the novel is “tragic”. That it is “cruel”, that the protagonists endure great cruelty. BWAHAHA. You hear this from blowhards like Harold Bloom, among other things. But the violence the two of them endure can just as easily be read as cartoonish, Laurel and Hardy type-violence. No one is seriously hurt, Quixote’s nose being a favorite target of this horrendous “cruelty and violence”. This is tragedy? Please. And then it is further claimed, by blowhards like Bloom,et al., that Cervantes is the equal of Shakespeare. This is when sanity has completely left the room - it is now time to clutch one’s forehead in disbelief. I believe one could make a very serious claim that the interior life in literature came into its own in the works of Shakespeare, whoever that was, whether it was that illiterate guy in Stratford, the Earl of Oxford, et al. - that doesn’t matter. The bottom line is - there’s not a hint of anyone’s interior life in this “novel”. Is Cervantes without talent? Of course not. Just to slop that much disparate material into one landfill, and to keep it going requires talent. Is it a work of “genius”, whatever that means? I don’t see any genius in it. Again, for me, there’s more genius in any half-dozen pages of the Canterbury Tales than there is in this gargantuan, flatulent collection of anecdotes that come from nowhere and go nowhere. I had heretofore successfully avoided reading this monstrous, empty nothing of a book, because I had intuited exactly what I ultimately experienced. I did read it, finally, because, it seemed to me something an educated person needs to have undergone, read, and experienced it - a lousy reason, if there ever was one. I wasn’t ennobled by it, entertained, transformed, and had not the slightest interest in the welfare of anyone in it, etc. Why? Because there was no one in it. Only a pastiche of mannequins, serving what purpose? None - other than to entertain a deeply bored middle-class who had learned to read and now had access to endless volumes of garbage. Sound familiar? Sound like the folks that walk into Barnes and Noble on a given afternoon? Why is it a “classic”? Because it was wildly popular in its time, because it arrived at the right time, because of its endless, utterly unnecessary length (let’s face it, it could easily be a 200 page book, and lose nothing), and then, most crucially, because of the host of “Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomena which secured its place as “classic”, inc. all the bloated, tenured Professors and critics who dared not disagree with what had now become the orthodox, expected reverence towards this “Great Book”. And let’s not forget the phenomena of ancestor worship, Spanish pride, etc. One feels, learns, and is transformed by one great Shakespearean poem or soliloquy a thousand times more than what one comes away with at the end of a thousand pages of Don Quixote. What possessed Richard Strauss to take it seriously enough to create his tone poem is quite beyond me - my guess is that it was simply the opportunity to use his overblown orchestra to produce stunning effects portraying wind, sheep bleating, etc. BTW, the death of HIS Don Quixote leaves Cervantes’ in the dust. It is recognizably poignant and human. What a concept! I marvel that I made it to the end, and I am extremely happy to now put it aside and never give it a second thought. I purchased it, and am sorely tempted to throw it in the garbage. It won’t stay with me, haunt me, none of that, not a chance. One can only be haunted by the ghosts of the once living. Nothing lives in this book. The protagonist who dies at the end of Don Quixote was never alive in the first place. In fact, his “return to sanity” and subsequent death makes even less sense than his initial descent into madness with which the book begins. Chalk it up to “melancholy”, says Cervantes, in the space of THREE OR FOUR PAGES. Anyone remotely familiar with the phenomenon of melancholy knows full well that, if it induces cognitive reshaping of any kind, it is in a direction other than towards the embracing of reality. But let’s be honest - the whole purpose of Quixote’s “return to sanity” is a lazy excuse to prohibit the author of the “false Don Quixote” from taking up his pen again and making money which Cervantes wants for himself. In fact, this is how the “novel” ends, making its purpose plain as day, with a trashing of the false author - Cervantes shows his cards, plain as day. If you were baffled, frustrated, and impatient with the absurd premise of this thousand page collection of spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically empty anecdotes, and hoping for some sort of payoff at its close, however small, you will be absolutely INFURIATED when you reach its last pages, and are likely to close the book in absolute disbelief. I want the twenty odd hours I spent enduring this empty nonsense back. It’s a minority view, I know. But it is mine.
I personally view Don Quixote as a comedic overt grandiose narcissist (overt grandiose narcissists are idealists and live an alternate reality in a cartoonish caricature even to the point of comedy of errors ) Every scene drains the characters involved (these characters will never forget Don Quixote after interacting with him 🤣) Note - just my opinion hence my own personal bias
Just like not everyone can get every joke I believe Don created that big ass book with the same joke to be more universal and try to make as many people see the truth more than the joke… the truth of intentions and reality… 37:26
Read part one many years ago and enjoyed it. Never read part two, as I figured it was a typical sequel that the author wrote to cash in on the original. probably won't now anyway as you gave away the ending.
@@Kakashi-v1f these kind of criticisms all go on and on I guess I’ll join the puppet show, pose: why imagine a moral or ethical teaching at all from them.
RIP Professor, You've changed my life. I will be sure to continue my philosophical journey with you in mind
Homage to Michael Sugrue
RIP Michael. I have been listening to your lectures for many years. Your thoughtful contributions to our world will be greatly appreciated now qnd for future generations. THANK YOU ❤️🙏❤️
This guy’s lectures are absolutely great. All novels, both in the Canon and out of it, whether comic or otherwise, owe their existence to Don Quixote. It is not only absolutely laugh-out-loud hilarious (and Cervantes is not above employing some fart jokes), it is deeply profound, possesses nobility of spirit and, on so many pages, touches the heart.
However, Prof. Sugrue calls Don Quixote himself the greatest comic hero in Western literature. In my opinion, that honor is a toss up between Quixote and Leopold Bloom.
Reading it in Spanish at the moment and I’m just blown away by the use of the Castilian language
After reflecting on this, I found much wisdom. One I would like to share what is about the faculty of the human mind, how we develop logic and don't just rely on instincts. Our cat can hear a sound and run away where human knows what it is based on experience. It really goes to show that in the past, we could never really rely on instinct, and any fantasy would be destroyed.
Don Quixote is symbolic of the naive discovering true wisdom, and not leaving the wisdom of their naive experiences behind.
Here Cervantes in romanian ruclips.net/p/PL2FkuXQQ7wZhL9jOUwLnMW8vgrMiQ0E3c
It's a commentary on the absurdity of holding a dishonorable world to a standard of honor and the delusion of modeling your life after romantic artistic renditions.
What should someone instead model their life after if not that?
Well said
@@ExcellentAudioAdventuresgood question, let me know when you figure it out
These lectures are like little gems! I'm so excited when a new one is released. Thank you so much..
Truly.
Here Cervantes in romanian ruclips.net/p/PL2FkuXQQ7wZhL9jOUwLnMW8vgrMiQ0E3c
This guy is amazing…love his clarity and passion.
So am I! Sugrue is just something.
What a wonderfully beautiful set of lectures! Absolutely BEAUTIFUL, is the correct word. Thank you for making these available to us. I continue to listen to you, today, in your current lectures and videos on RUclips. Much love.
I remember my first time reading don Quixote, I cried and my heart was broken when he said: "yo fui loco y ya soy cuerdo" and when he admitted what was his real name. I'll never forget you donquixote.
What's version u read it .? Spanish or English
Spanish version
0:29 It’s comical
1:53 Quixote inflates life
Dysjunction at center of laughter and pity 🎭
3:52 Living imaginatively
4:48 Panza
The World should be as it ought to be
Panza - reliable, predictable, comprehensible
5:57 Dolcinea - 6:18 TheEternalFeminine
8:37 Binocular Vision
Moral Grandeur
Hopeful Inspiring
Ponderous and Elephantine
9:58 Digression
10:41 Pseudo-Epic
*Average Man -> Living Imaginatively*
11:20 He’s read too many books 📚
12:49 Into The Inn
14:15 Same problems, different understandings of them
15:15 The Windmills
16:30 The Sheep 🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑
18:12 Mambrino’s Helmet 🪖
19:57 Chivalry: Sustains and Demands Acts of Faith
21:39 Challenge of a Virtuous Wife
23:43 Wineskins, no talking to a Knight.
25:04 None of us laugh at Quixotes intentions
*Book 2*
Quixote Vs The World 26:10
26:56 Keep this delusional man home
27:47 Idealists hurt by their victories as much as their defeats
32:01 Lion 🦁
35:44 The butt of other Peoples jokes, people take advantage of him, Panza gets to rule an imaginary island 🏝
Panza grows in leadership ability
39:03 Squire promotion
Knight of the white moon 🌙 victory
Don Quixote accepts defeat
39:58 herd of swine 🐷 🐖 🐷 🐖
40:34 Alonzo Ciano
43:54 Pathetic
Great Comedians can make you cry too.
amazing, thanks a lot...especially for this video
When I heard the story of the virtuous wife it sounded like a story out of Boccaccio's Decameron.
‘Workin my way through .. the first of many more times..thoughtful ever .. so amazing !!
Like Don Quixote, your spirit will also live on forever.
Really amazing! I'm a Law student and this lectures provides me a lot of insights.
Read Miles Mathis on appearances and reality. Good luck in your exams!
I love prof. Sugrue's lectures, and this one in particular gets really close to home as I am a Spanish native speaker and read the Quixote in its original language. I'm impressed by the intuitions he was able to dig up from a translation in English and they really got me thinking. One of the points I don't fully agree is that of our beloved Quixote being an example of heroism. If you are as crazy as him you can't be a hero. I think the virtue the Don Quixote seems to highlight in between the lines is that of an unrelenting friendship with his faithful Sancho. Friendship is a very common Spanish virtue. My two cents.
I think actually the only way you can be a hero is to be truly crazy. Don Quixote has all the virtues of a hero - he is brave, honourable, proud and hard working... although perhaps not very kind. Maybe he is an older type of hero, a crueler type. But it is the society around him that is filled with cynics that prevent him from being a true hero. If only people would accept his help and reciprocate his honour would he be the hero he truly is.
Thank you for your beautiful incisive perceptions. Illuminating and enlightening. I shall now tackle reading Don Quixote.
The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza’s who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote’s with a sense for ideals, but mad.”
- George Santayana
"Sanity" is very much overrated....
This quotation is from Interpretations of Poetry and Religion.
I assume prof. Sugrue misspoke and meant mention José Ortega y Gasset as the author of Meditations on Quixote.
Love hearing Dr.Sugrue w/o the invasive commentary from that global marketing lady on his more recent lectures 😊
Thankyou for these great lectures
Phenomenal lecture - thank you.
Greatest novel ever written .....period
Agreed 👍💯
This is an exceptional lecture indeed ☺️ Thank you!
Being, as being the kind of being aware of being a human being on earth for a period of time.
Human action then becomes an epic of what ought to be vs what is to be.
The Imagination v. The Empirical.
The epic can only begin when the chaos and order are enchanted in the minds and hearts of human beings.
I'm excited for this one!
Here Cervantes in romanian ruclips.net/p/PL2FkuXQQ7wZhL9jOUwLnMW8vgrMiQ0E3c
Love these lectures, i rarely hit the like button on youtube videos but hit like on every single one of these. thanks for sharing. ill pay for more.
Don Quixote's death reminds me of that Rob Lowe song,"What's so bad about peace,love and understanding?" .They both have a lot to tell us in our age of cynicism over idealism.
Fundamental principles of Renaissance:
Creation as an object to apprehend and subject to understand 🦅
“Reading too many romances” seems to be a dangerous pastime. Shame I didn’t worry about that
"Apart from its pure alchemical role, the cabala was used in the elaboration of several literary masterpieces, which many dilettantes can appreciate, without however guessing what treasures they hide under the attractiveness, the charm, the nobleness of style. This is because the authors --- whether they are named Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Plato, Dante, or Goethe --- were all great initiates. They wrote their immortal works not so much to leave to posterity imperishable monuments of the human genius, but rather to instruct it in the sublime knowledge of which they were the depositories and which they had to transmit in their entirety. We should judge in that way, apart from the already quoted masters, the marvelous artisans of chivalrous poems, jests, etc. belonging to the cycle of the Round Table and of the Grail; the works of Francois Rabelais and the ones by De Cyrano Bergerac; Don Quixote by Miquel Cervantes; Gulliver’s Travels by Swift; the Dream of Polyphilus by Francisco Colonna; the Tales of Mother Goose by Perrault; the Songs of the King of Navarre by Thibault de Champagne; The Devil as a Predicator, a curious Spanish book of which we do not know the author, and many other books which, albeit less famous, are not lesser in interest nor in knowledge."
Excellent and I really enjoyed this. Specially the section on Lothario.
This is amazing, I've listened multiple times to his entire series of lectures on Plato, the Bible, and philosophy, but I've never heard these literature lectures before! Do you have his lecture that covers Goethe's Faust? Thank you for uploading! He also does a series on United States history, but I can't seem to find it
No way, he has lectures on us history?!Well, I hope I find those, but here’s the Faust one: ruclips.net/video/T8YC9zhIKMA/видео.html
He goes go over Faust i listened to it recently fascinating book. It was on my book shelf because I wanted to too finish it but this gave me inspiration to finish the book.
Return when i've finished it, meanwhile i do hope to return soon for listen this gentlemen..it sounds so interesting.....
Damn those are powerful gulps. Sound on!
I did cry when I waching this . the death bed part, when he mentions Sacho : let's deny death. reminds me of Nietzsche or something.
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
Here Cervantes in romanian ruclips.net/p/PL2FkuXQQ7wZhL9jOUwLnMW8vgrMiQ0E3c
I like "Academy of Ideas",great artworks with speech,same for"Eternalised"
What year were these great lectures recorded? Amazing stuff.
I'll be enjoying this at least once a year for the rest of my life.
I do not see "Meditations on Quixote" written by Santayana (at 24:55). I see this written by Jose Ortega y Gasset.
You are correct. I'll have it corrected.
I read Don Quixote years ago. Thanks for reminding me of my sympathy and respect for him. But I think Dolcinai was an important character. Her life was changed by him.
If I remember, the deep pathos Don Q inspires also comes from his diminished fortune and the apparent indifference of his wife and children. (The exquisite and unique are always alone.)
Seem Don Quixote, because his victories and defeats are really defeats and illusory victories, seems he is Homeric like Achilles. Seems like Don Quixote would do very well in 2021, where people want to be a hero, just to be a hero and not really taking time to learn what the highest good is.
"Even though he is mad, he is never evil."
Fantastic.
Excellent
Is there perchance one of these wonderful lectures on Rabelais?
Thank You!
The character Don Quixote is like the Fool card in the Tarot deck. ❤
Dude's really hittin' the canteen.
On some Iberian plain, the ruminating machinations of Don Quixote saunter adrift; awaiting a fervently intrepid mind in which to reify.
Love it. Lots of food goe thought.
This was f****** awesome yes very crude statement totally appreciate the breakdown of the story understanding The Narrative the archetypes and what they mean
When you related Don Quixote and the adventure of the wine skins you picked up your coffee cup... next time hide a wine skin in the lectern and pull that out for a drink! 😆
Superb
I love this❤❤❤
The following is only my reaction, my opinion, no hate mail, please. You love the book, think it the most hilarious, profound thing you’ve ever encountered? I’m happy for you. Enjoy.
This is almost certainly the worst book I’ve ever forced myself to finish. It’s a very easy read. It is, however, humongous, hence time-consuming, at the end of which time you end up with nothing. NOTHING. Did I say “nothing”? I should have said - disbelief, exasperation, and rage.
I find the assertions that Don Quixote is the first modern novel and, heaven help us, the greatest of all novels, patently ridiculous. For any number of reasons.
Let’s begin with the fact that it’s been crafted, no less than most of the junk one finds when one walks into a commercial bookstore these days, to satisfy the demands of a bored middle class. Hence, we’ve got the lowest common denominator factor at work from the get-go. It’s a money-making venture, first and foremost. Intended, above all, to amuse. I would claim it fails spectacularly on that account, since there are no real protagonists, just wax figures upon whom Cervantes inflicts whatever random episodes occur to him. And when nothing occurs to him, well then, he just inserts unrelated stories, of which there are several in Part 1. He’s as bored as we are, apparently.
It is said that this novel stands halfway between medieval storytelling, in which the interior world of the protagonist is of no interest, and the modern psychological novel. This seems to me absurd on the face of it, since neither Don Quixote nor Sancho Panza display even a hint of having an interior life. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, in a couple of dozen pages, jumps off the page and into our hearts in a way one finds no hint of in DQ - she displays more life, self-awareness, and humor than our two protagonists manage to produce in 1000 pages of wearisome prose. BTW, re that “prose” - some folks imagine how wonderful the book must be in Spanish. But experts who know the language, including several great authors, have repeatedly said that there’s nothing remotely special about Cervantes’ use of language - the story’s the thing. Which story is that? Oh, you mean the 1000 pages of disconnected, psychologically unmotivated anecdotes with no over-arching narrative arc? Oh, I see. Gotcha.
And then there is the issue of what drives the whole novel, what makes it “funny” or “entertaining”, which, for me, it is decidedly not. Two jokes - Quixote’s madness, never explained - not a shred of psychological insight is offered into what drives it other than he has read too many bad novels and chivalry, and Panza’s penchants for puns and the stuffing of his face, the former of which seems to have dramatically increased in Book 2, for no discernible reason. So - the reader is expected to sit back and continue to laugh over the course of 1000 pages over what? - what are ultimately, are two very feeble, unfunny “jokes”, ugh.
It’s not a novel in any sense, by my lights. It has no narrative arc - it begins after the central event has already happened, Q’s descent into madness, without any psychological insight into its genesis. It goes nowhere, can go nowhere - it is a series of basically unrelated episodes, the order of which could easily be re-arranged without anything whatsoever being lost. That is to say, it has the form, more or less, of a TV sitcom. Nothing connects one episode to another other than the supposedly hysterical character flaws of the two main characters. It doesn’t rise to anywhere near the artistic level of the best TV sitcoms, e.g., the 1960’s Addams Family with John Astin and Carolyn Jones. It resembles it in that there is one disconnected episode one week, followed by another the following. It differs from it in this essential - Morticia and Gomez’s love is palpable, even moving. They are recognizable Homo sapiens, of flesh and blood, and we are touched by their love. There is nothing in this “novel” that is remotely moving. How could there be? Its principals are puppets, mannequins.
Then it is claimed that the novel is “tragic”. That it is “cruel”, that the protagonists endure great cruelty. BWAHAHA. You hear this from blowhards like Harold Bloom, among other things. But the violence the two of them endure can just as easily be read as cartoonish, Laurel and Hardy type-violence. No one is seriously hurt, Quixote’s nose being a favorite target of this horrendous “cruelty and violence”. This is tragedy? Please.
And then it is further claimed, by blowhards like Bloom,et al., that Cervantes is the equal of Shakespeare. This is when sanity has completely left the room - it is now time to clutch one’s forehead in disbelief. I believe one could make a very serious claim that the interior life in literature came into its own in the works of Shakespeare, whoever that was, whether it was that illiterate guy in Stratford, the Earl of Oxford, et al. - that doesn’t matter. The bottom line is - there’s not a hint of anyone’s interior life in this “novel”.
Is Cervantes without talent? Of course not. Just to slop that much disparate material into one landfill, and to keep it going requires talent. Is it a work of “genius”, whatever that means? I don’t see any genius in it. Again, for me, there’s more genius in any half-dozen pages of the Canterbury Tales than there is in this gargantuan, flatulent collection of anecdotes that come from nowhere and go nowhere.
I had heretofore successfully avoided reading this monstrous, empty nothing of a book, because I had intuited exactly what I ultimately experienced. I did read it, finally, because, it seemed to me something an educated person needs to have undergone, read, and experienced it - a lousy reason, if there ever was one. I wasn’t ennobled by it, entertained, transformed, and had not the slightest interest in the welfare of anyone in it, etc. Why? Because there was no one in it. Only a pastiche of mannequins, serving what purpose? None - other than to entertain a deeply bored middle-class who had learned to read and now had access to endless volumes of garbage. Sound familiar? Sound like the folks that walk into Barnes and Noble on a given afternoon?
Why is it a “classic”? Because it was wildly popular in its time, because it arrived at the right time, because of its endless, utterly unnecessary length (let’s face it, it could easily be a 200 page book, and lose nothing), and then, most crucially, because of the host of “Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomena which secured its place as “classic”, inc. all the bloated, tenured Professors and critics who dared not disagree with what had now become the orthodox, expected reverence towards this “Great Book”. And let’s not forget the phenomena of ancestor worship, Spanish pride, etc.
One feels, learns, and is transformed by one great Shakespearean poem or soliloquy a thousand times more than what one comes away with at the end of a thousand pages of Don Quixote. What possessed Richard Strauss to take it seriously enough to create his tone poem is quite beyond me - my guess is that it was simply the opportunity to use his overblown orchestra to produce stunning effects portraying wind, sheep bleating, etc. BTW, the death of HIS Don Quixote leaves Cervantes’ in the dust. It is recognizably poignant and human. What a concept!
I marvel that I made it to the end, and I am extremely happy to now put it aside and never give it a second thought. I purchased it, and am sorely tempted to throw it in the garbage. It won’t stay with me, haunt me, none of that, not a chance. One can only be haunted by the ghosts of the once living. Nothing lives in this book. The protagonist who dies at the end of Don Quixote was never alive in the first place. In fact, his “return to sanity” and subsequent death makes even less sense than his initial descent into madness with which the book begins. Chalk it up to “melancholy”, says Cervantes, in the space of THREE OR FOUR PAGES. Anyone remotely familiar with the phenomenon of melancholy knows full well that, if it induces cognitive reshaping of any kind, it is in a direction other than towards the embracing of reality. But let’s be honest - the whole purpose of Quixote’s “return to sanity” is a lazy excuse to prohibit the author of the “false Don Quixote” from taking up his pen again and making money which Cervantes wants for himself. In fact, this is how the “novel” ends, making its purpose plain as day, with a trashing of the false author - Cervantes shows his cards, plain as day. If you were baffled, frustrated, and impatient with the absurd premise of this thousand page collection of spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically empty anecdotes, and hoping for some sort of payoff at its close, however small, you will be absolutely INFURIATED when you reach its last pages, and are likely to close the book in absolute disbelief.
I want the twenty odd hours I spent enduring this empty nonsense back. It’s a minority view, I know. But it is mine.
I personally view Don Quixote as a comedic overt grandiose narcissist (overt grandiose narcissists are idealists and live an alternate reality in a cartoonish caricature even to the point of comedy of errors )
Every scene drains the characters involved (these characters will never forget Don Quixote after interacting with him 🤣)
Note - just my opinion hence my own personal bias
Can anybody tell me if doktor Sugrue have any lecture for Fydor Dostojefsky?
"Meditations on Quixote" is by Ortega y Gasset -- NOT George Santayana.
Nature's greatest and only joke; presupposing that appearance and reality are the same thing. :)
Just like not everyone can get every joke I believe Don created that big ass book with the same joke to be more universal and try to make as many people see the truth more than the joke… the truth of intentions and reality… 37:26
This sounds scaringly like Carl Jungs Psychology in action.
Genius
Wonderful lecture - enjoyed heaps. But oh god the microphone on those massive gulps he keeps taking >
🙏🙏🙏🙏❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Read part one many years ago and enjoyed it.
Never read part two, as I figured it was a typical sequel that the author wrote to cash in on the original. probably won't now anyway as you gave away the ending.
If you are going to take your lumps in life, then you might as well take 2 or 3 lumps of sugar in your coffee or tea.
Take a drink everytime he pauses and says: "Now..." and then continues.
No audience ??
Very Funny Book
Walker Barbara Taylor Michelle Gonzalez Daniel
Sugar Mike
Somebody buy this dude a copy of Disco Elysium.
🐱👍
🧙🏻♂️🫏💰
This guy is too hyper,,,rushing.....gulping and drinking...can't bear him...Slow down. Stand still...!!
idiosyncratic, not idiomatic about 8 and a half minutes in, otherwise on a roll!
Did Don have trouble with his foreskin?
As a physics professor, I'm at odds with stupidity and ignorance.
I don't know if this teachers actually read don quixote
Why do you have this thought, may i know?
@@Kakashi-v1f these kind of criticisms all go on and on I guess I’ll join the puppet show, pose: why imagine a moral or ethical teaching at all from them.
This is a ridiculous lecture. Don Quixote is a man driven to action buy absurd idealism clean from books of fantasy.
make a Don Quijote movie… a serious one. Would be cool