Don Quixote's lady:
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.