I am the stupidest man alive.
I win.
Is there a prize?
I have somehow been able to live half a century without seeing a thing so obvious that you will laugh when I tell you what it is. I only just realized the common denominator in all the stories to which I am drawn.
How could a person read and discuss and continually use as metaphors
1. A Message to Garcia
2. The Old Man and the Sea
3. Don Quixote de La Mancha
without realizing that each of these literary icons is a story about relentless determination? “You can knock me down but I will stand up again. You can break me but I will heal and begin anew. Failure is a temporary condition that does not frighten me. I am prepared to die on this mountain.”
Sigh.
I finally understand what Jose Ortega y Gasset meant when he said,
“Show me what you admire and I will tell you who you are.”
What do you admire?
Roy H. Williams
Likewise, I've always loved Martin Luther King and Alexander the Great and King Henry V.
Like Colonel Rowan in A Message to Garcia and Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea and that immortal Don Quixote, they just did the thing. They didn't merely plan and dream and run their mouth about it. They leaped. Utterly unqualified. Reckless perhaps. Maybe even delusional. Opening themselves to criticism from that cloud of mosquitoes that hovers ever so near...
Ignore the mosquitoes. Leap.
Like Colonel Rowan in A Message to Garcia and Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea and that immortal Don Quixote, they just did the thing. They didn't merely plan and dream and run their mouth about it. They leaped. Utterly unqualified. Reckless perhaps. Maybe even delusional. Opening themselves to criticism from that cloud of mosquitoes that hovers ever so near...
Ignore the mosquitoes. Leap.
