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MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA NARRATIVE HISTORYAMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA - Kouroo Contexture · MIGUEL DE CERVANTES MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA HDT WHAT? INDEX Miguel de Cervantes’s first poems, in appreciation of Spain’s

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Page 1: MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA - Kouroo Contexture · MIGUEL DE CERVANTES MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA HDT WHAT? INDEX Miguel de Cervantes’s first poems, in appreciation of Spain’s

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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October 10, Monday (Old Style): On either October 10 or September 29, 1547, Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcala de Henares, Spain, the 4th son of Leonor de Cortinas and Rodrigo de Cervantes. The father was a surgeon with a large family to support and, since he was deaf, limited means with which to do so.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

1547

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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Miguel de Cervantes’s first poems, in appreciation of Spain’s Queen Elizabeth of Valois, were published. He was still a student. However, he would be obliged to leave off writing while struggling to make a living as a chamberlain to Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva, accompanying this dignitary to Italy.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

1568

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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In Naples, Miguel de Cervantes joined the Spanish regiment for the naval battle against the Turks in Lepanto, and was shot in the left hand and twice to the chest while on board the La Marquesa. Although he would recover sufficiently to take part in further battles, he would lose the use of his hand.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.

LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

1570

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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Miguel de Cervantes was captured by pirates and taken to Algeria as a slave (after a series of unsuccessful escape attempts he would in 1580, at the age of 33, be ransomed by the Trinitarian friar Juan Gil).

Abraham Ortelius was appointed geographer to King Philip II of Spain, with Arias Montanus vouching for both his expertise and his Catholic orthodoxy.

1575

INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

GEOGRAPHER

By Peter Paul Rubens
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Miguel de Cervantes was ransomed by the Trinitarian friar Juan Gil and was able to return from Algeria to Spain. He soon found, however, that too many years had passed since the battles against the Turks in Lepanto. People had forgotten, and he was unable to secure the usual sinecure employments for distinguished naval veterans. He began to author poetry and plays.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

1580

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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Miguel de Cervantes’s novel LA GALATEA. By this point he was unhappily married with Dona Catalina de Palacois. To supplement his writerly income he began to work as a tax collector and soon he would be repeatedly imprisoned on account of collection techniques that were –shall we say– considered by some to be inventive and problematic. The legend is that it was during one of these enforced vacations that he schemed the plot for his grand “Don Quijote” allegory.

ESTATUTOS GENERALES DE BARCELONA was printed in Mexico City by Pedro Ocharte (note that this date is more than half a century earlier, two full generations of human life earlier, than the initial book that would be printed in the North American colonies).

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1585

HISTORY OF THE PRESS

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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Tradition holds that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra wrote “Don Quixote” while in prison during this year.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1594

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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Thomas Heywood’s IF YOU KNOW NOT ME, YOU KNOW NOBODY, OR, THE TROUBLES OF QUEENE ELIZABETH.

On the principle that anyone who killed Roman Catholics couldn’t be all bad, English merchants forwarded shiploads of musket and sword parts to Ottoman Turkey.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was living in poverty with his sisters, his niece, and his illegitimate daughter Isabel Saavedra in Valladolid when the first part of his EL INGENIOSO HIDALGO DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA came into the bookstalls.

(In this same year, William Shakespeare’s KING LEAR appeared.)

Now you might suppose that the runaway success of such a publication and its sequel would have set the Saavedras up for a life of comfort and security — but no, things did not work out that way.

1605

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It had been raw poverty that had forced Miguel de Cervantes to enlist in war service against the Turks and African corsairs, and the result had been that he had been wounded and captured and enslaved and had endured this existence for seven years before being ransomed. Nevertheless, when our guy had put out the initial installment of EL INGENIOSO HIDALGO DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA in 1605, out of the 669 personages described in the text inclusive of the two immortals “Don Quijote” and “Sancho Panza,” he portrayed not one as a villain. The Spanish printing industry was at a low ebb and techniques of publication were primitive. Margaret Stillwell has commented that “If Cervantes had been born when the Spanish states were in ascendancy, who knows what stunning format some sixteenth century printer might have produced for DON QUIJOTE!” Perhaps they might even have produced a Classic Comic edition in Spanish!

What you see on the following screen is a leaf from the 3rd Madrid edition printed by Juan de la Cuesta in this year — since this is the edition which the Madrid Academy has considered to be of the greatest textual significance:

[next screen]

1608

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Miguel de Cervantes published a collection of his short stories, NOVELAS EJEMPLARES.

1613

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A sequel to Miguel de Cervantes’s popular EL INGENIOSO HIDALGO DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA.

1615

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April 23, Tuesday (Old Style): Miguel de Cervantes died in Madrid. Just four days prior he had finished his PERSILES Y SIGISMUNDA, another allegorical novel — and we note in the prologue that the author has foreshadowed his own demise.

1616

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And, William Shakespeare died as of this same date (albeit not on this same day1):

1. At this point England was still using the Julian calendar but Spain had already switched to the Gregorian calendar. Cervantes had actually therefore been dead for ten days, before Shakespeare died. “Synchronize your watches, authors.”

A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS:

My books I’d fain cast off, I cannot read, ’Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at largeDown in the meadow, where is richer feed, And will not mind to hit their proper targe.

Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too, Our Shakespeare’s life were rich to live again,What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true, Nor Shakespeare’s books, unless his books were men.

Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough, What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,If juster battles are enacted now Between the ants upon this hummock’s crown?

Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn, If red or black the gods will favor most,Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn, Struggling to heave some rock against the host.

Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour, For now I’ve business with this drop of dew,And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower, — I’ll meet him shortly when the sky is blue.

This bed of herd’s grass and wild oats was spread Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use.A clover tuft is pillow for my head, And violets quite overtop my shoes.

And now the cordial clouds have shut all in, And gently swells the wind to say all’s well;The scattered drops are falling fast and thin, Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.

I am well drenched upon my bed of oats; But see that globe come rolling down its stem,Now like a lonely planet there it floats, And now it sinks into my garment’s hem.

Drip, drip the trees for all the country round, And richness rare distills from every bough;The wind alone it is makes every sound, Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.

For shame the sun will never show himself, Who could not with his beams e’er melt me so;My dripping locks — they would become an elf, Who in a beaded coat does gayly go.

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Some folks have supposed that this Shakespeare may have looked a bit like this, although actually we haven’t so much as a clue:2

2. We not only don’t know what Shakespeare looked like in real life, we have no idea of even approximately what he looked like. He could have been as walleyed as J-P Sartre and we just don’t know. Thus it is that the recent effort to richly imagine his life, by the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, entitled WILL IN THE WORLD, has been being mocked by Oxford don Richard Jenkyns:

Some people have birthmarks, and so Shakespeare may have had one.If he had a birthmark (and this cannot be proved), it would have added tohis self-consciousness when he came to London.In romances, the lost princess is often identified by a birthmark, butPerdita, the lost princess in The Winter’s Tale, is identified by sometokens; and this at once becomes explicable if Shakespeare was sensitiveabout his birthmark.

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Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian’s romantic tale GALATÉE, an imitation of the GALATEA of Cervantes.

Antoine Lavoisier assigned a new name which in Greek meant “generated from water” — “hydrogen.”

French aeronauts were going aloft in hot-air and hydrogen gas balloons (two years later Jean-Pierre Blanchard would venture across the English Channel in one of these devices).3

1783

3. By encouraging Europeans and North Americans to credit that technology could create a future markedly different from the past, these aeronauts would participate in the generation of the 19th-Century cult of human progress! By innovating an industrial process of hydrogenation of cheap oils to render them digestible, these scientists would participate in the generation of the 20th-Century epidemic of heart attacks and strokes due to atherosclerosis!

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Published posthumously, Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian’s abridgment of Cervantes’s DON QUIXOTE.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MINDYOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

1809

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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December: Percy Bysshe Shelley drafted “A Philosophical View of Reform.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge began a series of lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, and Cervantes, that would persist into March of the following year.

1818

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October: George Gordon, Lord Byron returned to Aston Hall.

The Websters visited Newstead Abbey.

From this month into April of the following year, Samuel Taylor Coleridge lectured in Bristol, England on Milton, Cervantes, taste, Shakespeare, education, the French revolution, and Napoléon.

1813

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July: Early in this month Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody opened, in the front parlor of the building she had leased at 13 West Street in Boston, her Foreign Library, a bookstore and circulating library.4

At the suggestion of Washington Allston she would stock imported art supplies. One section was allocated to the homeopathic nostrums created by her father, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody. She displayed on the walls the paintings her sister Sophia was offering for sale. Margaret Fuller had staged her “conversations” here in late 1839 and this would continue in the early 1840s. The Reverend William Ellery Channing would stop by to read the newspaper. Sophia would marry Nathaniel Hawthorne at West Street in 1842. The editors of and contributors to THE DIAL would meet there, and for a time in 1842 and 1843 she would publish this journal as well as writing for it (her “A Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society,” a piece about Brook Farm, would appear in the October 1841 issue, and her “Fourierism” would appear in the April 1844 issue).

I had ... a foreign library of new French and German books, andthen I came into contact with the world as never before. TheRipleys were starting Brook Farm, and they were friends of ours.Theodore Parker was beginning his career, and all these thingswere discussed in my book-store by Boston lawyers and Cambridgeprofessors. Those were very living years for me.

1840

4. Circulating libraries were privately owned collections of books and periodicals lent out for profit at fixed rates; this institution had its heyday in America in the first half of the 19th Century, just prior to the rise of the public library movement.

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In this year Miss Peabody issued the first of two printed catalogs of her book collection.5 The collection included such titles as Wolfgang Menzel’s GERMAN LITERATURE. TR. FROM THE GERMAN OF WOLFGANG MENZEL. BY C.C. FELTON.... (3 volumes, Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1840),6 Miss Peabody’s edition of Anna Cabot Lowell’s THEORY OF TEACHING, Lamartine’s HISTORY OF THE GIRONDISTS and TRAVELS IN THE EAST, Michelet’s MÉMOIRES DE LUTHER, Waldo Emerson’s NATURE, the Reverend Ripley’s LETTERS ON THE LATEST FORM OF INFIDELITY (a response to Andrews Norton’s attack on Transcendentalism), Robespierre’s MÉMOIRES, and Rosini’s LUISA STROZZI, in addition to classic works by Æschylus, Ludovico Ariosto, Honoré de Balzac, George Bancroft, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle, Miguel de Cervantes, the Reverend Channing, Chateaubriand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cousin, Dante, Dumas, Euripides, Gerando, Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hesiod, Homer, Victor Hugo, Mirabeau, Molière, Petrarch, Plato, Racine, Richter, Rousseau, George Sand, Schiller, Schlegel, William Shakespeare, Madame de Staël, Alexis de Tocqueville, Voltaire, William Wordsworth, and Xenophon. The collection also included various periodicals such as the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Boston Quarterly Review, THE DIAL, the Edinburgh Review, the Journal des Literarische Unterhaltung, the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine, the Musical Journal, the New-York Review, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Western Messenger.

5. A facsimile of this catalog still exists, as part of Madeleine B. Stern’s “Elizabeth Peabody’s Foreign Library (1840),” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 20 Supplement, Part 1, pages 5-12.6. Henry Thoreau would consult this volume on December 5, 1840. His extracts would consist of quotations from Lorenz Oken and from Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert.

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August 2, Tuesday: Bronson Alcott wrote Abba Alcott that on a 3rd visit to Thomas Carlyle, they had quarrelled outright.

Carlyle wrote Waldo Emerson about the encounter, describing Alcott’s “long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes,” speaking of him as genial, innocent, simple-hearted, good, venerable, but declaring him a Don Quixote “bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age,”7 a man “whom nobody can even laugh at without loving” but nevertheless a “bottomless imbecile.”

He warned Emerson against allowing his public reputation in England to become entangled with that of such a person. Emerson, frightened for his reputation, wrote to Alcott in England, warning that while his English friends could trust his “theories” they could not trust his “statement of facts.” And Emerson ordered Alcott to show this letter to his English friends, and Alcott did this.

1842

I shall not see him again.

THE ALCOTT FAMILY

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April 2, Friday: Henry Thoreau made several references to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra in his essays, and we do not know what edition he used. The Harvard Library edition, however, which was one available to him at least, was the four-volume 7th edition, revised, of 1743, printed in London for D. Midwinter: HISTORY OF THE RENOWNED DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA; FROM THE SPANISH. TRANSLATED BY SEVERAL HANDS, AND PUBLISHED BY THE LATE MR. MOTTEUX; REVISED ANEW FROM THE BEST SPANISH EDITION, BY MR. OZELL; WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES FROM JARVIS, OUDIN, SOBRINO, PINEDO, GREGORIO, THE ROYAL ACADEMY

7. Since Don Quijote was un hombre exageradamente grave y serio o puntilloso, this was a fine and accurate description of Concord’s own knight of the woebegone countenance. This is what John Brown looked like in 1842, as a failed businessman,

but the above description would also be a fine description, later, of a more mature John Brown: If Bronson Alcott could be said to have been a Quijote whose favorite reading was the New Testament, it could be said of Brown that he was a Quijote whose favorite reading was the Old. For Miguel de Cervantes put into the mouth of his antihero the following words:

1858

These saints and knights were of the same professionas myself, which is the calling of arms. Only thereis this difference between them and me, that they weresaints, and fought with divine weapons, and I ama sinner and fight with human ones.

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DICTIONARY OF MADRID, &C. &C.8

April 2. P.M. — To yew and R.W.E.’s Cliff.At Hubbard’s Grove I see a woodchuck. He waddles to his hole and then puts out his gray nose within thirtyfeet to reconnoitre. It is too windy, and the surface of the croaker pool is too much ruffled, for any of the croakersto be lying out, but I notice a large mass of their spawn there well advanced. At the first little sluiceway justbeyond, I catch a large Rana halecina, which puffs itself up considerably, as if it might be full of spawn. I mustlook there for its spawn. It is rather sluggish; cannot jump much yet. It allows me to stroke it and at length takeit up in my hand, squatting still in it.Who would believe that out of these dry and withered banks will come violets, lupines, etc., in profusion? Atthe spring on the west side of Fair Haven Hill, I startle a striped snake. It is a large one with a white stripe downthe dorsal ridge between two broad black ones, and on each side the last a buff one, and then blotchy brownsides, darker toward tail; beneath, greenish-yellow. This snake generally has a pinkish cast. There is another,evidently the same species but not half so large, with its neck lying affectionately across the first, — I may haveseparated them by my approach, — which, seen by itself, you might have thought a distinct species. The dorsalline in this one is bright-yellow, though not so bright as the lateral ones, and the yellow about the head; also theblack is more glossy, and this snake has no pink cast. No doubt on almost every such warm bank now you willfind a snake lying out. The first notice I had of them was a slight rustling in the leaves, as if made by a squirrel,though I did not see them for five minutes after. The biggest at length dropped straight down into a hole, withina foot of where he lay. They allowed me to lift their heads with a stick four or five inches without stirring, nordid they mind the flies that alighted on them, looking steadily at me without the slightest motion of head, body,or eyes, as if they were of marble; and as you looked hard at them, you continually forgot that they were realand not imaginary.The hazel has just begun to shed pollen here, perhaps yesterday in some other places. This loosening andelongating of its catkins is a sufficiently pleasing sight, in dry and warm hollows on the hillsides. It is anunexpected evidence of life in so dry a shrub.On the side of Fair Haven Hill I go looking for baywings, turning my glass to each sparrow on a rock or tree.At last I see one, which flies right up straight from a rock eighty [or] one hundred feet and warbles a peculiarlong and pleasant strain, after the manner of the skylark, methinks, and close by I see another, apparently a bay-wing, though I do not see its white in tail, and it utters while sitting the same subdued, rather peculiar strain.See how those black ducks, swimming in pairs far off on the river, are disturbed by our appearance, swimmingaway in alarm, and now, when we advance again, they rise and fly up-stream and about, uttering regularly acrack cr-r-rack of alarm, even for five or ten minutes, as they circle about, long after we have lost sight of them.Now we hear it on this side, now on that.The yew shows its bundles of anthers plainly, as if it might open in four or five days.Just as I get home, I think I see crow blackbirds about a willow by the river. [Yes.]It is not important that the poet should say some particular thing, but should speak in harmony with nature. Thetone and pitch of his voice is the main thing.It appears to me that the wisest philosophers that I know are as foolish as Sancho Panza dreaming of his Island.Considering the ends they propose and the obstructions in their path, they are even. One philosopher is feebleenough alone, but observe how each multiplies his difficulties, — by how many unnecessary links he allieshimself to the existing state of things. He girds himself for his enterprise with fasting and prayer, and then,instead of pressing forward like a light-armed soldier, with the fewest possible hindrances, he at once hookshimself on to some immovable institution, as a family, the very rottenest of them all, and begins to sing andscratch gravel towards his objects. Why, it is as much as the strongest man can do decently to bury his friendsand relations without making a new world of it. But if the philosopher is as foolish as Sancho Panza, he is alsoas wise, and nothing so truly makes a thing so or so as thinking it so.Approaching the side of a wood on which were some pines, this afternoon, I heard the note of the pine warbler[Pine Warbler Dendroica pinus], calling the pines to life, though I did not see it. It has probably been hereas long as I said before. Returning, I saw a sparrow-like bird flit by in an orchard, and turning my glass upon it,was surprised by its burning yellow. This higher color in birds surprises us like an increase of warmth in the day.

8. Unfortunately Google Books has as yet made available only one volume of this four-volume set. However, should you be living in Australia, the National Library has all four volumes of this edition in electronic form for the delight of all true Australians!

DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA

Whenever and wherever you see this little pencil icon in the pages of this Kouroo Contexture, it is marking an extract from the journal of Henry David Thoreau. OK?
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October 30, Sunday: The trial of John Brown concluded, with a finding of guilt. The separate trials of the others indicted, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., Edwin Coppoc, Shields Green, and Aaron D. Stevens, would begin, and would come to their conclusions, shortly.

Henry Thoreau notified Concord town officials that he would speak that evening on “The character of John Brown, now in the clutches of the slaveholder.”

That evening, Thoreau delivered “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN” in the vestry of the First Parish Meetinghouse in Concord. Emerson was present, and would report to Charles Wesley Slack in Boston that “He read it with great force & effect, & though the audience was of widely different parties, it was heard without a murmur of dissent.” In regard to Thoreau’s impassioned oration, this is what I have to offer.Take it for granite, Thoreau always knows what he is saying. Speaking not only of John Brown’s sharp tongue

1859

Green Copeland Haslitt

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but also of his carbine bought and paid for, one of the things Henry said on the evening of October 30, 1859 was

This is now on page 133 of REFORM PAPERS. But what I need to get you to understand is that it means exactly what it means, not what you maybe thought it would mean were it you who had said it. The thing I need you to notice is that Thoreau’s remark is an implicit reference to Miguel de Cervantes’s

This is an aphorism from Part II, Chapter 22 of EL INGENIOSO HIDALGO DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA. In current Spanish: En manos está el pandero que le sabrán bien tañer, or “In hands is the drum that it they

The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.

En manos eftâ el pandero que le fabra bien tañer,refpondio Sancho Pança.

Thoreau’s lecture of the evening of October 30, 1859 as echoed on page 133 of REFORM PAPERS.
This is an aphorism from Part II, Chapter 22 of ELINGENIOSOHIDALGODONQUIJOTEDELAMANCHA.
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know well to beat” or, rather, “The drum is in the hands of one who well knows how to thump it.” Thus Thoreau’s remark about the rat-a-tat-tat of Brown’s sharp tongue and Christian carbine is also an implicit reference to the most-quoted passage in WALDEN by far, the passage in which an obscure metaphor is drawn apparently on the basis of the drummer-boy rat-a-tat-tatting away on Concord common during the annual militia training!

What is happening in that passage of Cervantes’s book is that Sancho Panza was lowering Don Quijote into the Montecinos cave by a rope. And he was using this old Spanish proverb to say don’t worry, I know how to handle this rope, I won’t let you fall. He was practicality incarnate, all means and no end, while Don Quijote was impracticality ensouled, on his way to make his central attempt to define the relationship between reality and illusion, all end and no means.

We may well ask ourselves in what way a reference to Don Quijote might be seen as appropriate in this context of Thoreau’s defense of Brown. I can think of several right off.

1st, many scholars would insist to us that a study of the work of Cervantes is central to any consideration of the manner in which our representations of the world can, and cannot, modify the contexts in which our lives are embedded. That Sharps rifle was supposed to be the lever by which Brown was rearranging reality, but in actuality in that world of men at arms such a stick was of influence primarily as a symbol, while Brown’s primary lever for rearranging the reality of American race relations was –as Thoreau was emphasizing– his sharp tongue. Holding that Sharps rifle in his hand only served to draw attention to that tongue of his, attention that his sharp tongue deserved. We can say Thoreau’s problem essentially was, in the case of Brown, that he had decided he could not be satisfied with reality. Refusing to repeat the gestures that custom, tradition, and

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instinct make so easy, Thoreau was insisting on the coming into being of our myth of equality and fraternity.

2d, Don Quijote was un hombre exageradamente grave y serio o puntilloso, and this is a fine and accurate description not only of Concord’s own knight of the woebegone countenance, Bronson Alcott, but also of John Brown. If Alcott could be said to have been a Quijote whose favorite reading was the New Testament, Brown was a Quijote whose favorite reading was the Old. Don Quijote said

3d, there is the problem of the ridiculous mismatch of means and objectives about which Brown commented in his note on the morning of his hanging. Brown wanted a world of justice and peace and dignity so he set about enthusiastically to kill us until we got his idea, which is a fine way to get someone’s attention but is inherently self-defeating.

4th, in associating Brown with Don Quijote, Thoreau was making an implicit reference to the freeing of slaves as a knightly suspension of the ethical — for Don Quijote’s pity, compassion, and love came to outweigh the rigor of justice in that knight’s liberating of the galley slaves, and in the declaration he made to the guards of

After they would take Captain John Brown’s Sharps rifle awayfrom him at Harpers Ferry, they would allow this little boy topose with it. Grow up, son, and be a Christian like us: kill people, own slaves.

These saints and knights were of the same professionas myself, which is the calling of arms. Only there isthis difference between them and me, that they weresaints, and fought with divine weapons, and I am asinner and fight with human ones.

I wasn’t able to find an image of the original Sharps rifle. This is a replica of one that was manufactured in 1863.
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the slaves, and in his comments to Sancho and the priest. He said

Finally, this “tool” aphorism extracted from the episode in which Don Quijote descended on a rope into the cave of Montecinos is central to the story’s process of sanchificación of the knight’s spirituality and quijotización of the squire’s carnality. By virtue of their shared adventures, the righteously indignant northern white American and the desperately indignant southern white American needed to figure out a way to rid themselves of a society based on shackles: they needed to sanchify and quijotize each other. That’d be preferred to our northern Quijotes and southern Panzas using their efficient tools to kill each other standing in rows, which was otherwise the obvious prospect. When Don Quijote emerged from the cave of Montecinos he said to Sancho Panza

But he added

In this writing I will not only attempt to salvage Thoreau’s talk about Christian carbines and sharp tongues by linking it (via its implicit referent in Cervantes’s rub-a-dub-dub text about the foolishness of desperate acts of chivalry) to its implicit referent in Thoreau’s rat-a-tat-tat text about the foolishness of a life of quiet desperation.

I will also demonstrate that this sound metaphor of Thoreau’s –the distant different drummer– is, itself, an implicit reference to a Quaker non-violent metaphor of the inner light in common usage among members of the Religious Society of Friends, particularly those of the liberal faction including Friend Elias Hicks and his student Friend Lucretia Mott, and that such a metaphor cannot be bent –as it is commonly now bent by the unspirited– to sponsor the path of violence. Thoreau left himself an escape hatch and, in his appeal for sympathy for Captain Brown after that man’s desperate attempt to set free the despairing slaves of America, neither explicitly nor implicitly sanctioned any of John Brown’s violent means. I would maintain that Thoreau’s deportment and his words subsequent to the ill-advised Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 were precisely

It is not right that honorable men should beexecutioners of others.

Everything that offers some difficulty seemsimpossible to you.

Time will pass.

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parallel to Friend Lucretia’s deportment and her words after the ill-advised “Christiana Riot” in 1851.

Thoreau said in public, in regard to American slavery, that he did not wish to kill nor to be killed, but could foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by him unavoidable (REFORM PAPERS 133). Playing to his audience, our author elided the vast difference between killing and dying precisely as Richardson elided Charles Baudelaire. It was only in Thoreau’s private notes during his lifetime –to his Journal that is, and although as he says there was no lock on the door of his cabin there was in fact a lock on the desk in which he kept his Journal– that he was able to say plainly that when he said “both these things” he meant precisely “both these things,” not one and, if he turned out to be a lucky and competent killer, not the other, that if it came to the sacrificing of others to his own principles, this would necessarily involve his own simultaneous self-sacrifice for his principles, that he meant he might decide to not be alive rather than continue to be alive in a world that also included slavery.9 Now, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard pointed out in a writing that,

9. There is a phrase “noble army of Martyrs” in the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER that came into use in 1549 that may explain Thoreau’s remark about becoming willing to kill, or to die, to end enslavement. The phrase may have come into the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER from the TE DEUM, quite a bit older.

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although it dates to the same year of 1859, was unavailable to Thoreau,10 that

I am not saying Thoreau was wrong to elide in this way in that place at that time, for he was doing his level best to communicate with a bunch of people who were getting ready to line up and shoot each other down in windrows, and also I was not there and also I have great respect for his judgment, but I am saying that if there was a time for this sort of elision, it is now past. If not then, at least now, we should face the issue squarely. But unfortunately, as I said, the issue is not being faced squarely. For instance, on the night of July 10th in the Center Galleria of Worcester, an actor employed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, David Barto, sponsored in part by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management, re-enacted Thoreau’s lecture “A Plea for Capt. John Brown.” Worcester’s Mechanics Hall where the lecture was originally delivered was under restoration, but every effort was made for verisimilitude and Barto was able to lean on the wooden lectern that Thoreau had used on November 3, 1859 at Mechanics Hall. My impression is that Barto makes a Thoreau who is entirely too belligerent, for instance humorously threatening to beat children with his walking stick should they ask questions at the wrong times, humorously inviting one fellow to join him outside for a fight after the talk should he fail to follow Thoreau’s rules, etc. Therefore, in the question and answer period, I raised my hand

10. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR. NY: Harper & Row, 1962, pages 25-6.

Assuming then that a person is the victim of anillusion, and that in order to communicate the truthto him the first task, rightly understood, is to removethe illusion — if I do not begin by deceiving him,I must begin with direct communication. But directcommunication presupposes that the receiver’s abilityto receive is undisturbed. But here such is not thecase; an illusion stands in the way. That is to say,one must first of all use the caustic fluid. But thiscaustic means is negativity, and negativity understoodin relation to the communication of the truth isprecisely the same as deception. What then does it mean“to deceive”? It means that one does not begin directlywith the matter one wants to communicate, but beginsby accepting the other man’s illusion as good money.

. Kierkegaard, S[/-o]ren Aabye. THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR. New York: Harper & Row, 1962, pages 25-6.
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and posed the following question to Barto in his rôle as Thoreau:

In response Barto feigned anger and told me I had no right to inquire as to his private musings. He was unable or unwilling to address the question as posed. Need I mention that this might have got him in trouble with his employer, an agency which also employs a number of armed men in blue and a number of armed men in green, and instructs these armed employees in the fine art of when and how to kill in the name of their employer?

“A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN”

This topic of elision is an interesting topic for those of us who find this sort of topic interesting. While Thoreau was delivering his “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN” at the Concord Town Hall, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was delivering a sermon in his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Later on he would revise this sermon for publication, so we can credit it with some seriousness of preparation, and yet in the sermon he was portraying the raid on Harpers Ferry as having been perpetrated by 17 white men who had gone South without any black sponsorship or involvement and, in their whiteness, had created a race panic: “Seventeen white men surrounded two thousand, and held them in duress.”

A black newspaper would need to comment upon this elision, as of course it had been the noticing of men of mixed race among the members of that invading party which had set off the pronounced race panic: “Mr. Beecher must have read the papers, must have read that there were twenty-two invaders, seventeen white and five black. Why does he omit all mention of the latter? Were they not men?”11

11. It is very clear from several other things that the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher had written, that had he been forced to respond to this “Were they not men?” rhetorical question, he would easily have responded that indeed they were men — inasmuch as they were all of mixed race rather than being in that “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness.

I have heard you, and am troubled, troubled by whatwould seem to be a studied ambiguity on an issue of thegreatest relevance. Tell me, in the dark of the nightwhen you could not sleep, and you scratched these linesfrantically across scraps of paper with your pencil –can you recollect that frame of mind?– what was youintention? If it came to kill or be killed, for thoseare two very different things, if it came to the takingof the life of another for liberty, or giving your ownfor liberty –for these are two very different things–if it came to continuing your life but as a murderer–if it came to the point of doing evil so that good willcome– what, sir, was your secret intention as youscratched out your draft of this speech? Is it yourintention to teach us, by your life, how and when todie or how and when to kill?

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In the lecture “Some Good Books,” Waldo Emerson developed the following underwhelming parallelism:

Toward the end of this year the Reverend Issachar J. Roberts was commissioned to purchase some river steamers, on behalf of the Taipings in Nanking.

At the end of his journal entries for this year, Emerson listed his recent readings in Oriental materials: “Plotinus; Upanishad; Mahabharata; Viasa; Max Müller, Comparative Mythology, etc.; Saadi.”

1861

Eminent National Genius

Nation Author

Persians Hafiz

Chinese Confucius

Spaniards Cervantes

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“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <[email protected]>.

Prepared: June 18, 2014

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Well, tomorrow is such and such a date and so it began on that date in like 8000BC? Why 8000BC, because it was the beginning of the current interglacial -- or what?
Bearing in mind that this is America, "where everything belongs," the primary intent of such a notice is to prevent some person or corporate entity from misappropriating the materials and sequestering them as property for censorship or for profit.
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such arequest for information we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with <[email protected]>. Arrgh.