The Danger and Greatness of Reading

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I am nearing the end of my journey with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Quixote spends days and days, going without sleeping and eating for long stretches of time, reading the books of chivalry. And it drives him mad, he decides to revive the old, lost idea of knights errand and go about seeking damsels to save, the poor to succor and giants to slay.

The book is tremendously funny, but it is also tragic, especially as he becomes famous and people began to deceive and exploit him for their own amusement.

The danger of reading is the madness it can create where you are willing to charge upon a flock of sheep, lancing them right and left thinking you are fighting a vast army. Or more famously, you are to attack giants only to find them windmills.

The greatness of it is that you take on and try and live out powerful ideals. Sometimes Quixote will give explanation that he is living his highest moral values as knight errand.

Heschel writes: "Books are neither an asylum for the frustrated nor a means for occasional edification. They are furnaces of living strength."

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