Miguel de Cervantes

was a naval officer who while sailing aboard his ship "Sol" was captured and imprisoned as a PoW for 5 years. Wondering if anyone who has read / studied " The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha " have noticed any more allusions to the work beyond "Rocinate", "the self-romanticized white knight", and "tilting at windmills."

Thinking I'm going to read it next now that I'm done LF.

Time is brief,

anxieties grow,

hopes diminish,

and yet my desire to live

keeps me alive.

For the smaller context, taken from Don Quijote novel (part 1), it is a dialogue between two characters, discussing the low quality of the knightly novels and comedies in general that has started to spread. This is the response of one of them.

"And if someone objected to me that the authors of such books describe things made up and therefore don't have to pay attention to detail or truthfulness, I would say that the imagined fabrication is more beautiful the more likely it is, and for that more is liked, the purer and more possible it is. Fictional events must not contradict the readers' minds and must be written in such a way as to ease the impossibilities, eliminate the mistakes, engage the spirits and, in an act, astonish, tense, excite and provide entertainment, with wonder and joy walking hand in hand; but all this cannot be achieved by a writer who avoids probability in describing, on which, after all, the degree of perfection of the written work depends."

For a bit bigger context, I'll add part of the whole speech as it starts and follows, which I think is worth reading through the whole. The snippet above is, in this post, the third paragraph (I'll number them, just in case).

I think you may also happen to see him giving a response to people saying "it's a fantasy, it doesn't have to make sense" in the first sentence of the third paragraph (or the paragraph above).

The other day I just read through it and it struck me how true these words still ring, dealing with the same problems, we face today, in writing.

"From my own experience, I have seen what bad influence those so-called knightly novels are in the state; I also tried to read them, seduced by a perverse and false taste, but I admit that I read almost just the beginning of most of the books that came out, and neither of them I managed to read from start to finish, because it appears to me that more or less they all resemble each other as an egg an egg and that all of it is woven on one bridle. I believe that this kind of literature and composition is one of the so-called Mille tales, nonsensical tales whose sole purpose is to entertain, not to teach, as opposed to in apologetic tales, with a moral focus that provide entertainment and instruction. But although the main purpose of these books is amusement, it is incomprehensible to me how they can achieve it, since they are glooming with immense nonsense; for the soul of man can rejoice only in beauty and harmony, reflected in the things which our sight gives us or on which we meditate in our minds; however, what contains disgust and discord cannot fill us with happiness.

2.

Indeed, what kind of beauty can it contain and what symmetry of parts with the whole and the whole with the parts of the book or composition in which a sixteen-year-old boy attacks a giant, tall as a tower, and cuts him into two halves as if he were a marzipan! And if they still want to give us a description of the battle! They will tell you that there are million soldiers on the side of the enemy, and since the hero of the book stands against them, we must believe, if we want to or not, that the knight won over them only by the power of his mighty arm! What should one say about the ease with which a queen or hereditary empress throws herself into the arms of an unknown wandering knight? What mind, if not unequivocally uncultured and uneducated, can find grief reading about a great tower full of knights moving across the sea like a ship driven by a favorable wind, sailing in the waters of Lombardy today at evening and the next morning in the lands of Priest Juan of India or other countries that Ptolemy did not describe and that Marco Polo did not hear about!

3.

And if someone objected to me that the authors of such books describe things made up and therefore don't have to pay attention to detail or truthfulness, I would say that the imagined fabrication is more beautiful the more likely it is, and for that more is liked, the purer and more possible it is. Fictional events must not contradict the readers' minds and must be written in such a way as to ease the impossibilities, eliminate the mistakes, engage the spirits and, in an act, astonish, tense, excite and provide entertainment, with wonder and joy walking hand in hand; but all this cannot be achieved by a writer who avoids probability in describing, on which, after all, the degree of perfection of the written work depends."