This week, we were tasked with finishing don Quixote or more specifically, chapters fifty-six through seventy four. In these chapters, don Quixote and Sancho meet up again and go on a few more adventures before don Quixote is bested in combat by the Knight of the White Moon, and has to retire from being a knight before ultimately, falling ill and dying. Throughout the reading, we see that don Quixote isn’t as imaginative when it comes to dealing with problems, he is slowly losing his imagination as his constant struggles with reality are breaking him down. Before his death, however, he has a moment of clarity and sanity and voices his hatred of fictitious books of knights and princesses before drawing his last breath.

Seeing the end of the Woebegone Knight makes me a little sad. Reading this book has been a big part of my college experience so far, at a point in life where everything seems so new and unfamiliar. Maybe don Quixote was right to hide inside of his head and fill the world with his delusions, to some people it can be a scary place where the rules that are set in stone are often discarded for some that fit their style. It’s a world where if you don’t conform to a strict guideline, you’re considered an “outcast” or labelled as “weird” but don Quixote show us that sometimes it doesn’t matter what other people think, as long as you’re doing what YOU want to do and fulfilling YOUR dreams because while other are looking at you, they’re nor focusing on themselves and not focusing on becoming the best self the can become. And as don Quixote said himself “I would like to meet death in such a way that people know my life was not so bad that I should be remembered as a crazy man.”