Of the Delectable Engagement with Ideas [...]

Of the Delectable Engagement with Ideas Experienced in Attentive Reading and Creative Writing, 

together with further Droll Observations Related to Language and Art

“Well,” said Don Quixote, “and does she not accompany and adorn this greatness with a thousand million charms! But one thing you will not deny, Sancho. When you came close to Dulcinea, did you not perceive a certain perfume, an aromatic fragrance, a delicious something for which I cannot find a name, I mean a redolence, an exhalation, as if you were in the shop of some skilled glovemaker?”

“All I can say is,” said Sancho, “that I did notice a little odor, somewhat mannish. She must have been sweaty from all the hard work, which has toughened her up, by the way.”

“It could not have been so,” Don Quixote protested. “Surely you were suffering from a head cold, or else you simply smelled yourself. For I know well how she smells—that rose among thorns, that lily of the field, that liquid amber.”

“Maybe so,” replied Sancho. “I often get from myself the same odor that seemed to come from her grace the lady Dulcinea. But that’s no surprise; one devil is just the same as another.”

(adapted from the Ormsby translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 1:XXXI)

“Things are not always as they seem,” my sixth-grade teacher, arms akimbo, would intone frequently and dramatically, thus imparting one of life’s great lessons to the eleven-year-olds of the tiny town in West Virginia where I lived in the late 70s and early 80s. By that point in my schooling, I had already tapped a deep enthusiasm for books: for Kipling’s The Jungle Books, for Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, for any books I could devour on mythology, history, or animal behavior. I had been winning creative writing contest ribbons consistently since third grade, and in sixth grade I sped through the voluminous color-coded comprehension cards of the SRA Reading Lab. 

In retrospect, I know that I was already cultivating my fascination with the secret rhythms of words, the craft of constructing sentences, the constantly revised agreement between writer and reader that invites us to scan across the text and emphasize or anticipate something—a syllable, a phoneme, a pause, an entire paragraph—in the same way that the hurdler negotiates steps and strides between obstacles to avoid tripping or slowing down. A pacing example from Bradbury's The Halloween Tree: 

For the Tree was hung with a variety of pumpkins of every shape and size and a number of tints and hues of smoky yellow or bright orange.

“A pumpkin tree,” someone said.

“No,” said Tom.

The wind blew among the branches and tossed their bright burdens, softly.

“A Halloween Tree,” said Tom.

And he was right.

Without the breath of the wind between Tom’s lines above, the assertion in the final sentence would fall flat; it would lose the sense of inevitability that the wind’s intrusion animates for us. A great writer, too, challenges readers’ pacing, pushing the hurdle perhaps just a few inches, enough to alert our awareness if not completely break our stride. 

The writer’s tools are words, not colors, clay, or chords. They are the same tools used by most of us every day to express our thoughts, which means that creative writing and also language-learning are both strongly and essentially linked to our capacity to articulate and manipulate our perceptions about art, life, and perception itself. I am fortunate to have engaged in the study of these tools we call words in four languages other than my native English during different periods of my life: French, Hindi, Spanish, and Portuguese. A familiarity—or better yet, intimacy—with other languages opens many new doors to metacognition: the awareness of how it can be that we think what we think, and the ability to conceive alternative modes of thinking and of expressing thought. 

Approaching my senior year at William & Mary, I decided to read Cervantes’s masterpiece in the original language (not without the acquisition of a hefty Spanish-English dictionary). The dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho, sustained over two volumes published a decade apart in the early 17^th century, is, for many readers of the original and of dozens of accomplished translations, the greatest manual on friendship ever written. What these readers discover, alongside the addled knight-errant and his earthy squire, is a straightforward but profound apprenticeship in effective communication. Don Quixote relishes his search for a signifier that eludes him (not just Dulcinea in general, but also specifics like the aroma “for which I cannot find a name”) while Sancho, though quick to “call a spade a spade,” nonetheless provides a humbly diplomatic description of body odor. As they journey on together, Sancho becomes more imaginative while Don Quixote resigns himself to more realistic expectations, and the core of the work is exactly this process in which both learn to accommodate, in masterfully varied contexts, their own perspectives among the competing voices, strategies, and objectives of all the characters. 

The lady Dulcinea, or the peasant Aldonza? Windmills, or giants? Shaving basin, or golden helmet? Both, of course, and many other things besides. Things are not always as they seem, or smell. Like all good creative writing, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha exposes the artistic opportunities, and pitfalls, that lurk between the signified and its arbitrary signifier, between what we perceive, what we think, and what we can contrive to express.

“No hay de qué maravillarse; que un diablo parece a otro.”