Tilting At Windmills

I started blogging and making those Film Bin podcasts with very few internal guidelines except to be try not to be negative; I didn't want to be writing and recording just for the sake of demolishing, critiquing and being generally negative about people who had actually gone out and tried to make and do things. On some level that positive intention feels like the noble thing to have, and in this rampant Internet-fuelled world of people being far more mean and nasty than is actually called for, it also seems like the right thing. It's also a classic case of 'tilting at windmills' like that mad old character Don Quixote. You see, tilting at windmills is one of the ways some people use to stay alive inside and awake to things that would otherwise be forgotten. We generally need to aspire to making some difference in the grander scheme of things, being humans with egos the sizes of small caravans.

The sad side of tilting at windmills is indeed a very sad side, and again falls in line with Don Quixote. That fine old story, which I still haven't read in its entirety (it's on my pile), is made up of two volumes which were in no way written contemporaneously as their publications were separated by ten years of real time. Pray, forgive my ignorance, if I get any of this factually wrong. At the end of the story the deluded old nobleman, who had been touring around the country and having adventures most wild and imaginary, is cured of his madness and dies a broken man. How is that for a brutal allegory? We have to tilt at windmills or face reality in the face and die on the inside? Oh, reality, I tilt at thee!

My suggestion is therefore that we all tilt at windmills; It's actually quite healthy and we could make a difference to the world. It's akin to Danny Wallace and his insane quest in 'Yes Man', his own tilt at the windmills of life. We can be happier if we try to be more positive. I will continue to try and find good things that no-one pays attention to, talk about them in podcasts and prose, and write mad stories of little to no import. Maybe it will make a difference to someone somewhere, and maybe it won't, but if there's a point then it's not a windmill to tilt at any more. In common parlance, to tilt at a windmill is to attack a misperceived enemy or engage in delusional battle, and only time will tell if any of us are truly tilting at windmills or merely strutting for the crowd and seeking out attention.

It's unlikely that my reading will ever include the second half of Don Quixote's adventures, for that ending sounds especially bleak, but that first half will be finished one day. It's supposedly the best literary work ever written in total, and that doesn't surprise me. Those literary types love a bleak ending. They like not to tilt at windmills but survey the lives of those who used to. It's probably better to re-read instead 'Yes Man', look out at the world and say yes more. That's what Danny Wallace did, and he's a good man.

O.