Wednesday evening Convivium discussions often start hares<\/b> that occupy me for hours or days. And of course each hare<\/b> draws one to any number of interesting rabbit holes<\/b>, and so it goes. Last night, the Question was, essentially, How’s It Going?<\/i>. There was much talk of disappointments and rampant commodifications, so perhaps there’s an underlying Question: Can It Be Fixed?<\/i>. The answer is (generally, and often resoundingly) No<\/b><\/i>. And yet we keep wanting the answer to be Yes<\/b><\/i>, <== granting us efficacy in the world, having our efforts and energies mean<\/i> something, and not to have been somehow in vain… and so evoking rueful reflection on naïvetes of the past…<\/p>\n
Or perhaps (I thought to myself) it’s a matter of thinking about which windmills<\/b> we’ve chosen to tilt against<\/b>. That Quixotic image keeps coming up, ever since Cervantes 1604, and wants looking into as a prevailing recurrent trope. It begins in a Tale of
\nIt didn’t take too long (just 40 years) for the windmill-tilting trope to find its way into English as a fully-fledged metaphor<\/b>. A bit of googlement discovered the first occurrence, in John Cleveland “The Character of London Diurnall”<\/a> (1644), in which we find<\/p>\n The Quixotes of this Age fight with the Wind-mills of their owne heads; quell Monsters of their owne Creation; make Plots, and then discover them; as who fitter to unkennel the Fox, than the Tarryer, that is part of him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Windmills<\/b> now stand for<\/p>\n …to waste time fighting enemies or trying to resolve issues that are imaginary, unimportant, or impossible to overcome…<\/p>\n …the pursuit of “an unrealistic, impractical or impossible goal”…<\/p>\n …an exercise in futility…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n