As Democrats Face Risky, Momentous Choices in 2024, What's Don Quixote Got to Do With It?

A Gustave Doré illustration from an 1880 edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote

Update, 7/21/24, 2:45 p.m.. - Joe Biden demonstrated the toughest kind of courage on Sunday - by not pressing forward into the breach - and chose to pass the torch, announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 election and endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Original post 7/20/24 - Below I’m posting a reflection on a passage from Cervantes’ 1605 novel Don Quixote that comes to mind every time I face a pivotal decision amid consequential and enduring uncertainty - even unknowability.

The choices mulled by a knight staring at a monster-filled pool of bubbling tar come to mind now amid the fevered internal and public debates among Americans (including many of my friends and family members) who are united against the prospect of a Trump / Heritage Foundation presidency but divided over sustained support for the candidacy of President Joe Biden or the “pass the torch” argument.

Personally I’m for passing the torch - taking the leap to a new candidate despite the unknowns. I think

Matthew Yglesias

nails things well in his new post supporting Kamala Harris and an open convention. As I wrote on X, that's no easy task, but nothing is easy in this monumentally pivotal political year.

Of course the core decison is President Joe Biden’s alone. He is the knight staring at a simmering pool full of emotions, accomplishments, setbacks, monsters he’s sworn to defeat and futures he craves to shape. Everything we are saying or doing is presumably done in hopes of influencing - however indirectly - his move.

The far harder move for him is to withdraw than plunge forward. But it would be the braver one. Here’s the passage written by Cervantes, expressed through Don Quixote:

“For come, tell me, can there be anything more delightful than to see, as it were, here now displayed before us a vast lake of bubbling pitch with a host of snakes and serpents and lizards, and ferocious and terrible creatures of all sorts swimming about in it, while from the middle of the lake there comes a plaintive voice saying: ‘Knight, whosoever thou art who beholdest this dread lake, if thou wouldst win the prize that lies hidden beneath these dusky waves, prove the valour of thy stout heart and cast thyself into the midst of its dark burning waters, else thou shalt not be worthy to see the mighty wonders contained in the seven castles of the seven Fays that lie beneath this black expanse;’ and then the knight, almost ere the awful voice has ceased, without stopping to consider, without pausing to reflect upon the danger to which he is exposing himself, without even relieving himself of the weight of his massive armour, commending himself to God and to his lady, plunges into the midst of the boiling lake, and when he little looks for it, or knows what his fate is to be, he finds himself among flowery meadows, with which the Elysian fields are not to be compared.”

It’s a passage that’s been in my head since I heard it recited in stentorian tones in the mid 1970s by the remarkable Sears R. Jayne, a Brown University professor of comparative literature, when I took his course in comparative Renaissance literature. (Jayne, who died in 2015 at age 94, is one of many mentors I regretfully never thanked while they were alive.)

The passage came in handy around 1995, when I faxed it to the wonderful woman who is now my wife (I still have the aging sheet of paper), hoping she’d overcome doubts. She did, as did I. All’s well.

I posted about it on my New York Times blog Dot Earth in 2013.

And here we go again.

Sometimes the heroic choice is not to jump in.

I’d love your thoughts.