Quixotism: P B Shelley
P B Shelley [1792-1822] Don Quixote was not a foolish man who tilted at misperceived windmills. He was a dreamer, an idealist who refused to accept a diminished vision of the world. His pursuits, albeit impractical, were born of a burning hunger for meaning, justice, and beauty. Reality as commonly accepted is often too narrow to contain human aspiration. Quixote dared to imagine an ideal world and live as though that imagined world was real. Can we take Quixote not as a figure of comedy but as a quiet emblem of hope? Let us not forget that many human inventions were born of some quixotism. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley died at the young age of 30 because his quixotism couldn’t live with the normal world’s absurdities. He was expelled from the University of Oxford at the age of 19 because he espoused atheism in a world that saw no redemption without Christ. Shelley couldn’t accept many human follies and vices. He took a strong stand against tyranny, oppression, and the cru...
