José Cueli: The poetic delusions of Quixote

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The same as Cervantes, like a stream flowing its current, has reflected a timeless light. He is seen, felt, heard, touched, like someone close. Everything he lives, does, and says is so authentic that it rings true, despite being a delirium, and leaves us with faith in ourselves, unbelieving men; in veins and arteries, the breath, the blood, the desire, the life.

Not in vain is Don Quixote a wanderer through the villages of El Toboso, mountains and plains, pastoral encounters and nightly rests in roadside inns, in search of the impossible. Yes, Don Quixote is in love with the impossible, with natural enchantment. With the thrilling phenomenon of life that communicated to him its subtle current laden with effluvia.

Delving into Cervantes's literature provokes in me an emotion similar to that which I experience when I enter Freud's consulting room : that feeling of enchantment, of beauty; the confusion of the particular with the essential, the apparent with the real. A sensation that creates an illusion, a delirium that merges with life. The joy of living, not of winning, as described in The Marriage of Camacho. The joy of walking.

One must not remain motionless, Don Quixote seems to say. For walking pays extreme attention to the subtle fact of walking. Because walking is nothing other than time: the intangible, the mysterious, of being.

Delving into the literature of Cervantes, especially Don Quixote, as with Freud, allows us to pinpoint the motive that, barely foreseen, fades, escapes, and then lulls itself to reappear. The Spanish-influenced humanistic tradition that permeated the elites in Vienna prepared Freud to become a cultured man, but one untethered by the conventions of the time.

In this Córdoba, Cervantes entered the Jesuit school, which accepted children of modest means along with those from the upper classes. Cervantes left such fond memories of that time as a grateful student, who would later recall, from the lessons he received there, in the passage from The Colloquy of the Dogs, Scipion and Berganza.