An Apology for an Essay Just Below This

    Friends to this blog, following these words of introduction is an essay that you may feel is too strange to bother with. It has almost nothing at all to do with angling and is exactly three times the length of the standard newspaper column of 800 words. Be warned.
    It might look like an article for a travel magazine; though I don’t think any self-respecting travel magazine would touch it. Therefore I’m blogging it to you good readers.
    A couple decades ago, I got seriously hooked (Ha! Note the angling metaphor that sneaked in) on Spain, the home stomping-ground of my much admired Don Quixote. He had read all those old books of great adventure and went mad in the pursuit of his own adventures and their dangerous enchantments. He was hooked on old chivalry and I was hooked on old him.
    I have a hunch that reading old books makes us all a little crazy. We do this insane thing of believing what we read and so enter worlds that never were and never will be. Worlds that makes us do irrational things for love, for a poetics of love and life that might be. We fall helplessly under their enchantment.
    Until, in the end, like Don Quixote we dwindle toward disenchantment which can be cruel and destructive-- or a beatitude of love’s memory. My reading of Don Quixote’s final disenchantment and return to the sanity and absolute reality of death is as a beatitude.
    I recommend Spain to you with its wild Spanish dons, Quixote best of all, and the terrible intensity of their crazy lives. Please consider reading below....