Claims

Jorge Luis Borges illustrated the burden of being unable to form abstractions through a character with perfect memory who remembered every detail of every leaf, cloud, and ripple, and thus found everything perpetually different and confusing, even his own face in the mirror.

Dulcinea, Don Quixote's lady love, is presented as a commonplace woman largely oblivious to him, yet her significance lies not in her actual qualities but in what Don Quixote projects onto her—she represents the 'eternal feminine' (what Goethe called 'Ewic des Weiblich'): something to aspire toward, hope for, and work toward.

Much of comedy derives from the fundamental joke of confusing appearance for reality; a critic once remarked that nature has only one joke, and thus literature has only one joke—that thinking appearance and reality are the same thing.

When Don Quixote dies, his spirit lives on in Sancho Panza, who becomes his spiritual heir—as Sancho increasingly adopts idealistic qualities, Don Quixote's body may die but his spirit of heroism and imagination is transferred to the squire.

Rainier Maria Rilke, in his 'Letters to a Young Poet,' writes: 'Do not allow yourself to be confused in your aloneness by something within you that wishes to be released from it; this very wish, if you will calmly and deliberately use it as a tool, will help to expand your solitude into far distant realms.' He argues that struggling with one's authentic aloneness is not something to escape but to embrace and expand through.

David Foster Wallace, in a commencement address years before his suicide, told a parable of two young fish encountering an older fish who asks 'how's the water?' The young fish continue swimming and one later asks the other 'what the hell is water?' Wallace's point: the most obvious, ubiquitous, and important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about. In day-to-day adult existence, these banal platitudes have 'life or death importance.'