The Sanity They Gave Him Back (Don Quixote)"

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were a gentleman in La Mancha
with a small estate and too many books
and the books did what books do
to a mind that cannot stop believing them —
they replaced the furniture
The barber's basin became a golden helmet
The inn became a castle
The peasant girl from El Toboso
became Dulcinea
and Dulcinea was more real
than anything the village had to offer
because you had decided she was
and decision, in your case,
was stronger than evidence

[Verse 2]
You charged the windmills
because you saw giants
and the argument
that they were obviously windmills
missed the point so completely
that four centuries of scholars
are still having it
You did not misidentify a windmill —
you lived in a world
where giants were possible
and the rest of us
live in the one
where they are not
and it is not clear
which world is poorer for the distinction

[Chorus]
Sancho followed you anyway —
the fat practical man
on the donkey behind the skeleton on the horse —
and he followed you not because
he believed in the giants
but because he believed in you believing
which is a different kind of faith
and arguably a harder one:
to watch a man fight flour and wind
and hand him his lance back every time
without ever saying
what the flour already knew

[Verse 3]
You freed the galley slaves
who immediately robbed you
You challenged a puppet show
and destroyed the puppets
You mistook a funeral procession
for an enchantment
and the mourners for sorcerers
and at every encounter
the world offered you correction
and you declined it
with the courtesy of a man
who believes the world
is simply misinformed
about its own contents

[Bridge]
The books did this —
the romances of chivalry,
the ones they burned in your courtyard
while you were sleeping
because your friends believed
that if they could destroy the fuel
the fire would stop
But you woke up and invented
a new explanation:
an enchanter had stolen your library
which means you were never wrong —
you were sabotaged by magic —
and the difference between delusion and faith
is only ever a question
of how good the architecture is
and yours was load-bearing

[Outro]
On your deathbed
you woke up sane —
Alonso Quixano again,
no longer the knight,
no longer tilting,
no longer seeing giants
or enchantments or Dulcinea
in a girl who was just a girl
and the sanity was the cruelest thing
anyone ever gave you back
because the world you returned to
was the one without giants
and that world had nothing in it
worth charging at
The drawer where they keep your armor
is the first novel ever written —
Cervantes put you in it
and you have not stopped riding
because the book never ends
the way the deathbed says it does:
somewhere, right now,
someone is reading Chapter Eight
for the first time
and the windmills are giants again