{This little exercise has been useful if for no other reason than I now know from whence the word Hidalgo was derived...}
From Hugin & Munin, via Ni Vu Ni Connu:
1. Pick up a book.
2. Turn to page 23.
3. Pick out the fifth sentence.
4. Post it to your blog with these instructions.
I didn't have any books at hand... then realized I have access to any book that's posted on the internet. Did a search for the Gutenberg Project; the first book that popped up was Don Quixote, by Miquel de Cervantes Saavedra. Unfortunately, there were no page numbers in the online text; so I scrolled down to where the story began, clicked "page down" twenty~three times, and this was the fifth sentence:
Down went Rocinante, and over went his master, rolling along the ground for some distance; and when he tried to rise he was unable, so encumbered was he with lance, buckler, spurs, helmet, and the weight of his old armour; and all the while he was struggling to get up he kept saying, "Fly not, cowards and caitiffs! stay, for not by my fault, but my horse's, am I stretched here." ~~ Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Wish we'd studied that in high school instead of Man of la Mancha...
The CBC has featured a fascinating three-part series on Don Quixote in their evening program, Ideas; coincidentally, they aired that series again just last month. It sounds like a fascinating book, & I regret that the CBC has no online content for those episodes; the best I can do is point you towards somebody else's notes.
~ ~ ~
I have what might be described as an infestation of books.
Boyfriend is after me to conduct a cull... true, we lack the space to keep them, but I've always been of the opinion that it would be solved simply by getting more bookshelves. And I like to think that books are good insulation, both literally & poetically.
So there are books I own which I haven't yet read, and books that were read long enough ago that I barely remember having read them. I feel somewhat guilty about that... still, I haven't knuckled down on them {possibly because I have a very high guilt threshold}.
You see, as of late, I'd been having cravings for a book that would hold my fascination; but nothing I owned seemed very appetizing. I'd been devouring the news every day to get some sort of fix {the CBC, the Globe&Mail, the Gazette, Canoe, the BBC, Annanova, Newshub, etc.} but it was all just so unsatisfying...
Thanks to this little exercise, though, I think perhaps Don Quixote might be the way to go.
...of course, I don't own a copy, so that would necessitate buying another book, which means I'd have to waste hours in various out~of~the~way used bookshops looking for just the right edition...
Darn.
'Til then, the online version it is. I'll tell you how it goes...
Posted by edgar at April 14, 2004 10:59 AM