Meditations on Quixote

Meditations on Quixote by Jose Ortega y Gasset, translated by Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin, 165 pages

Meditations on Quixote was Ortega's first published work, an exploration of the Spanish character as distilled in its literary exemplar.  Musing in the shadow of the Escorial, Ortega finds in the Don the intersection between modernity and antiquity, matter and spirit, body and mind, the particular and the universal, science and myth, the Germanic and the Mediterranean, the novel and poetry, comedy and tragedy, disillusionment and hallucination.  As the former supplant the latter, however, he discovers that the latter are not annihilated, but secrete themselves within the former.