charles lamb was right about don quixote

The end of Don Quixote is not quite right; he has three options in light of his vanquishment: to carry on regardless as before, to give up the chivalry idea but switch to a pastoral setting (to become a shepherd) or to renounce the whole business and embrace 'normality'. He chooses the latter; an outcome that Dostoevsky considers the saddest imaginable. Certainly the choice he makes is a let down and supports Lamb's idea that Cervantes planned to end the book after Part One adding Part Two before another writer got there first. At the conclusion of the first part his chivalric narrative is working well and as the idea of multiple narratives is now commonplace each of the above three options has equal weight. Dostoevsky's notion of self deception or compounding lies with further lies is off target; Quixote is not a liar; he describes things as he sees them. We need a frame of reference within which to capture his immortality. Consider Munoz' Double Bind; here a lift goes up and down; it is nearly a real lift but not quite; more an alternative or possible lift; one of many possible lifts none of which being in any sense privileged; looking down are mysterious figures a bit like us but not quite. This is a preferred locus for Quixote; he is one of the figures up in the lift looking down on us-forever.

melancholy tailors

....returning to the topic of the physiognomy of students ( Blog- May 12 2008) : think of this as a further contribution to a literature of assistants (Walser,Kafka etc); this is a literature in which jobs (rarely professions) are described in a certain way; personal characteristics are replaced by a single, obsessive act; students press papers to their face, assistants stand around like 'waiters'. These job holders or seekers are melancholic. There is no point checking in the empirical world whether these physiognomies hold true. Charles Lamb wrote a piece on Tailors; they are melancholic, he says. This doesn't call for a survey of tailors. For Lamb the investigation into tailor-melancholy follows Robert Burton; perhaps clothes are the first outward sign of the fall of the human race; or is it because tailors are excessively fond of cabbage. Burton has a sort of method: first identify general features of tailors (melancholy) then move onto to other authorities on the subject, symptoms and causes. For example, fondness of cabbages is a symptom of melancholy.  Blog-July 12 2007 refers to an approach to understanding certain questions from a parabolic aspect; Burton's method offers such an approach.