The Man who killed Don Quixote

[Drunk Monk]

Twas gifted to me by my learned and judicious DOOM brother Bob knowing full well my fascination and delight of Dali, so learned the peculiar manner of which beguiled and inspired us both, entrusted me to examine this classic epic volume of knight errantry for the innocent pastime.  Upon my adventure to Spain, the first thing I did was to scour my library, now mostly in storage, for this exquisite volume that had lain time out of mind, carelessly accruing dust in a cardboard box, and began to peruse its pages in preparation for the journey, having only before sampled some of the yet for a humanities course at the university well over a quarter century prior.  Sadly, this literary expedition was embarked upon too late, for the many distractions of preparing for this Spain excursion were so overwhelming that little time could be allocated to the venerable volume and its marvelous sentence striation, so eloquent and verbose, mastodonian in weight and bearing, was so sufficiently arduous as to distract me from the verb by the time Cervantes's paragraph-long sentences realized their inevitable conclusion.  So the book lay dormant for many months after our return, despite its exuberant poetry and extraordinary illustrations, the like of which many I had never seen before, until such time as I had opportunity to read again for pleasure, ironically at the Zen monastery of Tassajara where the quixotic visions of Cervantes stand as the very antithesis of Zen, and yet, through the sheer genius of the author, some truth emerges about the plight of man and his madness and delusions.  The tale is compulsively tangential, often detouring into other tales told by supplementary and irrelevant characters with so little to do with the Knight of Woeful Figure beyond crossing paths; furthermore, the tale somewhat abruptly concludes after hundreds of pages with little resolution for poor Sancho Panza, the over loyal, folie à deux-ridden, yet cowardly servant.  And yet, it is an extraordinary read, couple with Dali's exquisite and scribblesome illustrations, that I cannot but express my sincerest and deepest gratitude for a gift given so many years ago form a very dear old friend.