Don Quixote

As if you didn't indulge me every day, today I ask for a little extra indulgence.Our windmill is a former prop that was was regularly set afire in a performance based upon Don Quixote by the now defunct Cirque de Flambe. We've removed the heavy metal vanes and replaced them with swimming noodles.The fire in the performance, I assume, represented the intensity of Alonso Quijano's imagination as he sallies forth into the world, believing himself to be the chivalric hero Don Quixote de la Mancha. I prefer to think that he is neither "a madman nor a fool," as the great critic Harold Bloom writes, "but someone who plays at being a knight-errant." Bloom, in his book The Western Canon cites Dutch historian Johan Huizinga who in his masterpiece Homo Ludens asserts that play is the source of all human culture.Play is a voluntary activity, unlike madness and foolishness. Play, according to Huizinga, has four principal characteristics: freedom, disinterestedness, excludedness or limitednss, and…