I’ve finally started reading Miguel de Cervantes’ famous novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. I’m reading it in translation because my Spanish is nowhere near up to the task, but from the little I was able to compare (reading the dictionary more than the Spanish version), the translation I got from Penguin Classics is very good. (Amazon link.) I’m only a few chapters in but there’s something very interesting right in the first few chapters. Though before getting into it, I want to mention that, at least so far, it is absolutely hilarious. The humor is just amazing. Cervantes really is a master.

In case, dear reader, you are like me some weeks ago and have read none of Don Quixote, I’ll just give an extremely brief summary of the plot so far: Alonso Quixano (Quixano is pronounced “key hano”) is a gentleman with a small farm who spends almost all of his money to buy books of chivalry and almost all of his time reading them. The books become his life to the point where he confuses them for reality. He then decides that he will live out the books for himself and become a knight errant, winning glory for himself and improving the world through his mighty deeds. He pulls out an antique suit of armor still in his family’s possession, renames himself to Don Quixote de La Mancha (La Mancha is the area where he lives), and sallies forth into the world riding his farm horse who he renamed Rocinante and who he has convinced himself is a mighty war-horse.

In his first real adventure (after he has been knighted by an inn-keeper) he comes across a farmer who is beating a boy who works for him. Don Quixote intervenes and the boy says that he is not so negligent as the farmer claims and that, moreover, the farmer owes him money. Don Quixote takes the side of the boy and demands of the farmer that he stop beating the boy and moreover that he pay the boy what he owes him. The farmer, intimidated by Don Quixote’s armor and lance, promises that he will. Don Quixote accepts this promise in spite of the boy’s protestations that the farmer will just go back to beating him as soon as Don Quixote is out of sight, assures the boy that everything will be fine, and rides off. As he rides off, Don Quixote thinks no more of the boy but only about the great deed which he just performed. And just as the boy predicted, as soon as Don Quixote was out of sight and earshot, the farmer goes back to beating the him.

Alonso Quixano’s goal of helping people is a noble one but his method is all too common among people who are trying to be good: they do easy things that they think should help rather than hard things that actually will help. What this amounts to is that they want to be good on their own terms. But being good is something that we cannot do on our own terms, because being good means conforming ourselves to reality.

Don Quixote takes this to an absurd extreme, of course, because this is a comedy, but it’s a thing that can be seen all the time in real life. For example: consider nagging. Nagging consists of asking a person to do something many times, the goal being that they will eventually do the thing out of irritation so that they will no longer have to suffer being asked. Of course, if the goal is only to achieve the result for one’s own sake, this may simply be a safer means than hitting the person until they do the thing desired, but no one considers this to be a good deed. The kind of nagging people consider to be a good deed is usually when the thing is to the other person’s benefit. And, again, if the only thing that’s required is that the person do something once, then nagging may possibly be a reasonably way to achieve it. If someone really needs to get around to repairing the leak in the gas pipe in their basement, almost any means of making them do it is probably justifiable. But very few things in life are like this; most things that a person needs to do that someone might nag them about are things they will need to do well, or else will need to do again in the future when the nagger isn’t around. Both of those require a person to see the good of what they’re doing and will to do that good. Nagging a person will not encourage them to do that; if anything, it tends to discourage it since their attention is focused on eliminating the irritation. Nagging, in this case, is a way for a person to feel like they’re making the world a better place while actually making the world a worse place.

It’s not hard to find other examples of this kind of thing. Consider people who give unsolicited advice. It’s very easy to tell someone what to do; the less you know of their circumstances the easier it is. It’s also the case that the less you know of their circumstances, the less useful the advice will be (except by accident, of course). Giving them unsolicited advice can thus seem like doing a good deed, but it’s very unlikely to do any good. This is, incidentally, related to how it’s very unlikely to be taken; the person receiving the unsolicited advice is very likely to see the mismatch between the advice and their circumstances—the mismatch the person giving it hasn’t taken the trouble to find out about. For very little investment of effort and only a little investment of imagination, a person giving unsolicited advice can feel very virtuous while doing no one any good.

We’re each given a great deal of good to do in the world but we often find it unsatisfying because the good that we’re given to do is only a part of what produces a visible result. There’s a common expression when trying to help someone that perhaps one at least planted a seed, but “planting a seed” is, often, far closer to a visible effect that what we’re actually given to do. Sometimes we’re given to till the soil so that someone else will be able to plant the seed. Sometimes our job is to remove rocks so that someone else may till the soil so that a third person can plant the seed. Probably more often, what we’re given to do is to remove two or three of the rocks, and the rest are given to others to remove, so that, later, several people can each till part of the soil.

Doing only the part we’ve been given to do requires trusting God that once we’ve done what we can, that’s enough, for whatever the overarching purposes that we can’t even know, is. The common mistake, which Don Quixote so humorously exemplifies, is to not be content with trusting, and to try to pretend that we’ve actually been given the whole thing. To do the good we’re given to do requires becoming familiar with reality as far as we can, and the more we learn the more we become aware of how limited our role is. This is why, to really do good, we must give up trying to get the glory from it. This is why there is the extremely practical, if mildly hyperbolic, saying: there’s no limit to what a man can achieve so long as he doesn’t care who gets the credit for it.