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this age-old grunt of combat, my hearing has gone dull and mute as if I’m underwater, yet still I hear sweet Marguerite saying again, He came to me whilst thou were away in Scotland defending France’s honor , and my mother, He sent me on a needless errand to Alençon , and my father gone now these many years, Your life is but a balance of just and unjust and you are the hinge it matters upon , and Count Pierre in the trial I brought against Le Gris, The innocence is with my squire , and the king himself, my liege lord, I cannot choose, I will not choose, I shall not choose , a whole cacophony of voices drowning the gasp of the spectators when they saw my flesh open and I stumbled to the ground and began like a crab to scuttle away—oh Lord, I beseech Thee, do not render me a cuckold, Thou hast afforded me valor and victory in forty-one battles but if I lose today, all is lost, my honor will fly and be hanged with my body—the talk in the Court and courtyards and market stalls will not be of my steel and of my strength but only of the gray in my beard and my faithless M, whose father, ’tis true, was a traitor to the Crown, but she is pure, isn’t she, Lord—my living son will no longer be my son, but his, and my land no longer my land, but his—oh Lord, I’ve sworn three oaths to Thee today, called upon Our Lady and Saint George and praised the Passion all in Thy holy name, amen—
    Le Gris’s legs go awobble and he blunders facedown and I’m on him and I bang open his visor with the pommel of my dagger and I demand he unburden himself of sin—even as I push the blade into his soft flesh he says, blood frothing in hisbeard, In God’s name and on the damnation of my soul, I have no crime to confess , and I push the steel in farther and say, Confess, man , and he does not and so he dies and I win and I am alone, questioning the nature of Truth.

Tilting at Windmills: Nicholas v. Quixote
    On the Plains of La Mancha, Campo de Montiel, Spain,
    March 15, 1565
    Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.
Maximus the Confessor



Argus Nicholas the Giant, Ageless,
    in the Guise of a Windmill, from Pallene but Now of Spain
     
    T he old man is not as daft as he may appear to be—we are, indeed, the giants that he sees—after Heracles and his army of fiends destroyed most of our warriors, my surviving brethren and I pledged ourselves to love, to peace, to song, and so became courtiers, immense and strong and loud—alas, we came to this terrain, wide and wondrous Spain, and soon our melodies attracted Malady, goddess of the plains, and of the winds and of the rains, who appeared to us as if from some radiant dream, bejeweled in myriad grains and draped in olive branches and antlers, and our poems bent her ear and wooed her heart and she was our dear muse, our master, our art, and we thrived until her jealous husband, Freston the Mad Magician, cast a spell that stole our voice and turned our skin to stone—no more the spinning of yarns, now only our sails nigh two leagues long twirling over and over and over again—we stiffened solid as trees receiving the breeze blown across Sierra Nevada and birds light and shit on our shingles and the sun burns the lye white off our skin—yet this old man sees clear the giant I am, the old warrior I was, and he challenges my statue self—he shouts for me to glance the way to Heaven’s gate before he charges and now it’s too late to turn back and so, in turn, I spin him ass over end or trim horse over limb and shatter his lance and drop him on his pants and, as surely as one look from monstrous Medusa could turn flesh to stone, he has made me quick again.
    Would that I had hands and the chance, when the next winds swung my arms low, I’d dust this knight’s bottom and lift him high thereafter for he has, sweet prince, reminded me who I truly am.

Don Quixote, 49,
    Knight Errant de la Mancha
     
    I am not fool enough to believe this windmill a