Another Omen/Reading the Signs

Or; ‘the injustice of outwardness’

Neither Cervantes (if I can speak for him) or I suggest living lives by omens. I imagine it’s a very slow way to proceed. Like a paragraph full of links, living by omens offers too many possibilities, distracts you from the narrative (which, I concede, can be a good thing), requires too much constant attentiveness. Plus you don’t really ever know how good you are at reading the signs. I’d be perpetually anxious that I was missing something…

Clearly at the end of DQ, Sancho is trying to propel DQ forward and be encouraging. Though he doesn’t know the true identity of the Knight of the White Moon, Sancho’s pretty happy to be going home and prevented by DQ’s defeat from engaging in knight errantry for one year:

At the entrance of the village, so says Cide Hamete, Don Quixote saw two boys quarrelling on the village threshing-floor one of whom said to the other, "Take it easy, Periquillo; thou shalt never see it again as long as thou livest."
Don Quixote heard this, and said he to Sancho, "Dost thou not mark, friend, what that boy said, 'Thou shalt never see it again as long as thou livest'?"
"Well," said Sancho, "what does it matter if the boy said so?"
"What!" said Don Quixote, "dost thou not see that, applied to the object of my desires, the words mean that I am never to see Dulcinea more?"
Sancho was about to answer, when his attention was diverted by seeing a hare come flying across the plain pursued by several greyhounds and sportsmen. In its terror it ran to take shelter and hide itself under Dapple. Sancho caught it alive and presented it to Don Quixote, who was saying, "Malum signum, malum signum! a hare flies, greyhounds chase it, Dulcinea appears not."
"Your worship's a strange man," said Sancho; "let's take it for granted that this hare is Dulcinea, and these greyhounds chasing it the malignant enchanters who turned her into a country wench; she flies, and I catch her and put her into your worship's hands, and you hold her in your arms and cherish her; what bad sign is that, or what ill omen is there to be found here?"

But there is an ‘ill-wind’ to contend with. As I’m reading Chapter 73, I know that there is only one more chapter, a very short chapter. I know that I’m about to finish the book. I’m grappling for a strategy. I know I’m not going to like the way that it ends just as I don’t like the way that The Female Quixote ends or the way Pepita’s DQ ballet ends. I start Chapter 74. I don’t even like the title: OF HOW DON QUIXOTE FELL SICK, AND OF THE WILL HE MADE, AND HOW HE DIED. I’m reading gingerly. And then right in the middle of the chapter, somebody on the outside starts talking to me (about photography or cars or the chimney or taxes). And I am distracted. And I resume and finish and put the book down and immediately pick up Ivanhoe which I’d positioned conveniently at my elbow. I want and don’t want to move on:

Such was the end of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, whose village Cide Hamete would not indicate precisely, in order to leave all the towns and villages of La Mancha to contend among themselves for the right to adopt him and claim him as a son, as the seven cities of Greece contended for Homer.

Oh Don Quixote (and I selectively quote here and conveniently omit the tirade against “the false and foolish tales of the books of chivalry, which, thanks to that of my true Don Quixote, are even now tottering, and doubtless doomed to fall for ever”):

For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine to write; we two together make but one…