DON QUIXOTE

by William H. Benson

January 29, 2004

     The most well-remembered scene from Cervantes’s Don Quixote is the Man of La Mancha, a knight suited in steel armor, astride his horse in a full gallop, his lance tilted, in a full-throttled attack upon a giant.  Sancho Panza, his trusty pot-bellied sidekick, had warned him that it was not a giant but only a windmill, but Don Quixote had brushed aside his friend’s words.

     “It is easy to see that thou art not used to this business of adventure; those are giants. . . . Betake thyself to prayer. . . . For this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”

     His lance broke upon impact, and Don Quixote and his horse went rolling across the Spanish plain, “in a sorry condition.”  And so they picked themselves up and set off on more extravagant follies that Quixote believed were heroic and chivalrous acts. 

     At one point he stabbed at some wineskins, believing that they were enemy soldiers, until he saw their “blood” cover the floor red.  Then, he watched a puppet show until  he was overcome with emotion at a battle scene such that he jumped up onto the stage with his sword lifted and then slashed downward “at the Moorish puppets, knocking some of them over, beheading others, crippling this one, mangling that one,” stunning the audience and the puppeteer.

     Another time Don Quixote and Sancho rescued some prisoners who, once they realized they were free, turned on their savior and on Sancho and stripped them of their clothes and pelted them and their horse and donkey with stones.  Cervantes described the scene after the prisoners had fled.

     “They were left alone now—the donkey and the horse, and Sancho and Don Quixote; the donkey, crestfallen and pensive, wagging its ears now and then, being under the impression that the hurricane of stones that had raged about them was not yet over; the horse, stretched alongside his master, for the hack also had been felled by a stone; Sancho, naked and fearful of the Holy Brotherhood, and Don Quixote, making wry faces at seeing himself so mishandled by those to whom he had done so much good.”

     Of that pitiful scene a critic remarked, “All of which should teach us to liberate galley slaves precisely because they will not be grateful to us for it.”

     Don Quixote is too mad, too idealistic, too much of a trouble-maker, and Sancho is too trusting and too willing to follow.  Across the Spanish landscape they travelled, meeting up with rich and poor, men and women, royalty and peasants, masters and slaves, and Don Quixote thought it best to interfere in their lives.  Invariably all parties turned on him, and no one, least of all Don and Sancho, were seemingly better off after.

     Today officials would probably recommend professional help for someone so “quixotic”, so idealistic, and so beyond the realm of reality, but four hundred years ago the Spanish rulers would either imprison such a person or simply allow him to suffer the indignities and misfortunes which he brought upon himself for his foolish behavior, which is what happened to Don Quixote.

     Scholars are still trying to decide if Cervantes wrote a comedy or a tragedy or an interplay of both.  We, the readers, at first laugh at the foolishness, and then later we feel saddened as we watch the poor man’s illusions and dreams repeatedly being mangled by the cold hard brutal facts of life.  The Man from La Mancha had a dream, and instead of seeing it as something off in the future to be pined for until achieved, Don Quixote seized it when he put on his steel armor, spurred his horse, and charged at the giant.

     At the end of Cervantes’s book, which is too long and yet ends too quickly, Don Quixote put his life’s mission in perspective.  “I have set injuries and insults straight, righted wrongs, punished arrogance, conquered giants, and trampled on monsters.”  Few readers then or ever since have been able to claim such startling personal victories.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

by William H. Benson

January 15, 2004

     For Christmas this year I received two books, and coincidentally both were recent biographies on Winston Churchill.  Considered the greatest Englishmen who has ever lived and also the greatest leader of the twentieth century, his story is an amazing adventure in force of will, determination, and leadership.

     He was born on November 30, 1874 into wealth and privilege to an English father and an American mother.  His father, John Churchill, Lord Randolph and the Duke of Marlborough, was only twenty-five in April of 1874 when he married the twenty-year-old Jennie Jerome, the American daughter of a New York City financier who owned race tracks.

     Neither parent provided Winston with any direction during his childhood years, preferring to enjoy their own lives separately without any interference from their son.  Winston had a non-relationship with his father and a semi-relationship with his mother.  Early on they turned the parenting duties over to a hired nanny, Mrs. Everest, who then became the central emotional prop in Winston’s life.

     Eventually this troublesome lad was packed off to Harrow, a boarding school for boys devoted to the classics.  His teachers there considered him a very poor student, but Winston refused to get his mind wrapped around the numerous verb conjugations of Greek, Latin, or French.  However, he enjoyed narrative history, and he learned to write tolerable essays due to a Mr. Somervell.

     Winston later said that “this teacher was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing—namely, to write mere English.  He knew how to do it.  He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. . . . I had three times as much as anyone else.  I learned it thoroughly.  Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.”

     His father then died when Winston was just twenty-years old, and Winston was then on his own.  But by age twenty-six Winston was world famous, a war hero, a best-selling author, a millionaire, and a member of Parliament where he would then serve for most of the next sixty years.  Seemingly coming from nowhere and without help from anyone he pushed himself into a position where people had to listen to him and then follow him.  How had he done these things?

     Certainly determination and ambition had always been there, but underlying those qualities was a superior talent in delivering the English language to his listeners and readers.  For six decades his spell-binding speeches in and out of Parliament captivated audiences.  And he could write histories and biographies that pulled his readers into new areas of scholarship and into fascinating facts and ideas that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.

     For Churchill the English language was his primary tool to accomplish his and Great Britain’s goals in defeating Germany in both world wars.  Sincerity always underscored his words.  When he said, “We shall never surrender,” his friends and enemies understood that he meant exactly that.

     His speeches included a strong beginning and an emotional ending.  He organized them around a single theme, and frequently he drew pictures.  “We shall fight on the seas and oceans. . . . We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”  Always he preferred the one-syllable Anglo Saxon word over the polysyllabic Latin or French word.

     Churchill died Sunday morning, January 24, 1965, less than two months after his ninetieth birthday, but coincidentally on the same day that his father–John Churchill, Lord Randolph, the Duke of Marlborough, the dad who had failed so miserably at parenting–had died seventy years before.    

     Winston frequently laced his speeches with words such as freedom and victory and loyalty and sacrifice and bravery and fighting to the bitter end.  All lovers of truth and freedom in every generation need to hear such words again and again.  We should hear them today.

NEW YEAR’S DAY RESOLUTIONS

by William H. Benson

January 1, 2004

     On January 1, 1831 William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, began publishing the Liberator in Boston.  It carried its motto on the first page: “I am in earnest.  I will not equivocate.  I will not excuse.  I will not retreat a singe inch.  I will be heard.”

     Garrison was an extremist on the issue of slavery in that he called for the immediate release of all slaves on moral and religious grounds.  He was opposed to gradual emancipation and colonization in Africa.  He demanded total freedom for the slaves immediately.

      Garrison denounced the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” because it counted each slave as 3/5ths of a person for the purpose of determining how many representatives each state sent to the House, but then it did not permit the slave to vote.  On July 4, 1854 he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution with the words, “So perish all compromises with tyranny.”

     The Southerners responded to Garrison’s extreme view by bringing forward the reasons that slavery was a necessity in the South.  Increasingly fearful and anxious about a slave revolt, they tightened their controls over the slaves.  As the South fought hard to keep slavery, it became a bastion of reaction.

     A century before Garrison, a Quaker and a traveling minister named John Woolman worked his way each year from New England to the Carolinas and to the western frontiers preaching the Quakers’ vision of the Gospel.  Whenever he confronted slave owners in the South, he tried to convince them of the evil of slavery by insisting on paying the slaves who served him.  He worked quietly but persistently to move the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting toward an anti-slavery position.

     Woolman also wrote an essay, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Slaves, in which he persuaded his readers that slavery was an evil, a moral wrong, and a mistake.

     The historian David Brion Davis wrote, “If the western world became more receptive to anti-slavery thought between 1746 and 1772, the self-effacing Quaker was a major instrument of the transformation.”

     Garrison and Woolman represent two different methods when confronting a moral wrong.  One is aggressive and the other passive.  Garrison’s “I will be heard,” stands in stark contrast to Woolman’s “here are Some Considerations to think about.”  One method demands action now.  It is in your face.  It is emotional, and it is relentless.  It seeks to overwhelm the opposition.  The other is quiet, passive, but convincing in the rightness of its position.

     The Western world eventually turned on slavery and eliminated it, but not before the U.S fought a vicious and bloody civil war.  One view is that the war was mainly caused by the extremists in the North, the abolitionists, such as Garrison, and those reactionary Southerners who responded by pushing for secession.

     As is usual, there are moral wrongs and deep injustices in the world today.  Slavery is still an institution in certain pockets of the world.  Women are badly mistreated throughout the Middle East.  The issue of abortion has stubbornly not disappeared.

     And then there is the fight in Palestine over who will own and control the land—the Israelis or the Palestinians.  Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has gone so far to stop terrorism that he is building a four hundred-mile wall to divide the two nations.  And after 9-11 what were we to do?  Send in the troops and root out the al Queda and the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, or turn the other cheek and in a state of paralysis wait for the next attack?  President Bush made his decision, and the French and the Germans did not approve.

     New Year’s Day is the day to formulate resolutions and write down goals for the next twelve months.  As we do so, we can think about our approach.  Shall it be highly charged or low-keyed, emotional or even-tempered, critical or persuasive, loud or quiet?  Each style produces a reaction from others who can undo what we wish to accomplish or can assist us in its achievement.  The wisdom is found in knowing which style is appropriate for a situation—Garrison’s or Woolman’s.