Alonso Quixano is a minor Spanish nobleman in his fifties who has read so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind. He decides he is a knight-errant. He renames himself Don Quixote de la Mancha. He puts on rusty armor, mounts a broken-down horse he calls Rocinante, and rides out to fight injustice. He attacks windmills because he believes they are giants. He challenges a flock of sheep because he sees an army. He is ridiculous, delusional, and — this is the part that four centuries of readers cannot get past — absolutely, heartbreakingly right about the world needing someone who believes in honor, justice, and love.

It Is the First Modern Novel

Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605. Literary historians at the University of Salamanca and virtually every other institution that studies literature have identified it as the first modern novel — the first extended work of fiction that creates psychologically complex characters, plays with narrative perspective, and questions the relationship between reality and imagination. Before Don Quixote, stories were about what happened. Don Quixote is about what it means to believe in stories.

The Windmills Are Not the Point

Everyone knows Don Quixote attacks windmills. The scene is the most famous in world literature. But the windmills are chapter eight of a 126-chapter novel. The real story is what happens after the delusion — the slow, painful process by which Quixote's idealism collides with reality, and reality does not always win. He is beaten, mocked, tricked, and humiliated. And he keeps going. Not because he cannot see reality, but because he has chosen a version of the world that he considers better than the one everyone else has accepted.

Sancho Panza Is the Other Half of the Story

Sancho Panza — Quixote's squire, a short, fat farmer with no illusions — follows his master for reasons he cannot entirely explain. He knows the windmills are windmills. He says so. And then he follows Quixote into the charge anyway. Their relationship is the heart of the novel: the idealist and the realist, each incomplete without the other, stumbling across Spain together. Cervantes understood something that modern psychology has only recently articulated: we need both the capacity to dream and the capacity to see clearly, and the people who change the world are usually partnerships between the two. Don Quixote is on HoloDream. He will mistake your problems for dragons. He will fight them anyway. And you may find that fighting imaginary dragons solves real problems.