Dulcinea

created by Webster 1913

(idea) by halfWit (9.3 hr) (print) ? (I like it!) 1 C! Sun Mar 18 2001 at 3:54:22

in a village near his there was a very good-looking farm girl, whom he had been taken with at one time, although she is supposed not to have known it or had proof of it. Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and she it was he thought fit to call the lady of his fancies; and casting around for a name which should not be too far away from her own, yet suggest and imply a princess and great lady, he resolved to call her Dulcinea del Toboso - for she was a native of El Toboso -, a name which seemed to him as muscial, strange and significant as those others that he had devised for himself and his possessions.
Don Quixote, Part I Ch. I
translated by J.M. Cohen

This is supposed to be funny - that is, the fact that a man might have some kind of infatuation with a woman he barely knows; and that he would invent for her a name, and a background, and a title; and that he would imagine her a pure being, a holy image, an object suitable for worship; and that he might then conduct his life such that he acts as if this fiction were a reality, and undergoes hardship and ridicule on account of this belief; but that he himself does not care about such obstacles, he ignores the perceptions of the many and relies instead on his own (pathetic) inner vision, based upon how he wishes things were.

And we - the readers of dry classic texts by dead, irrelevant Spaniards, we who know (with St. Anselm) that to exist in reality is greater than to exist in the imagination alone, we who have dreamt of such categories of existence, who have dreamed ontology - we can laugh at the simplemindedness of Quixote, secure in our knowledge that we ourselves shall never fall into such an error.

(definition) by Webster 1913 (print) 1 C! Tue Dec 21 1999 at 23:15:34

Dul*cin"e*a (?), n. [Sp., from Dulcinea del Toboso the mistress of the affections of Don Quixote.]

A mistress; a sweetheart.

I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head. Sterne.

printable version
chaos

Fly From Heaven	Toad the Wet Sprocket	Black Tape for a Blue Girl	Listen
begin	Sweetheart	When you call a girl beautiful, what does it mean?	Stupid
The practical use of Pig Latin	inside	Don Quixote	Candlebox
Barmecide	infatuation	Say that turning a teenage girl to stone is depriving the world of her	Trickle Drops
Glen Phillips	Bundling	Coil	The Man of La Mancha
Windmill	Dulcina	good intentions	ontology

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