From the Narrow Desert

Yesterday, the number 121 kept coming up. My wife was running the washing machine and asked me to check how much time was left on it. It was 1 hour 21 minutes. Later, when I stopped at a gas station, the attendant said, "Is $121 okay?"

In the evening I went to a used bookstore and was drawn like a magnet to a slim volume called Parsifal and the Search for the Grail by Charles Kovacs -- lecture notes for use in Steiner-Waldorf schools -- and knew I should turn to page 121.

With this story we leave the brave knight Don Quixote, a man who really had some of the qualities of the true knights -- courage, love for battle, the wish to combat evil -- but, alas, lacked common sense and lived in a world of fantasy and illusion. And we also leave Sancho Panza, who had commonsense, but could not understand noble ideals and principles at all. . . .

In the end Don Quixote returns to La Mancha, his home village, and falls ill. But as death approaches he awakes from his dream of knights, and he dies with a clear mind, whilst Sancho Panza cries and weeps at the loss of a master who -- even in his folly -- was a good man, a man who strove for goodness.

Emanuel Schikaneder in the role of Papageno, and the Visconti-Sforza "Fool" card

Some free-association here.

I was rereading some comments on one of my posts about The Magic Flute. I had compared Prince Tamino and his feather-covered sidekick, Papageno, to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and William Wildblood added, "They are almost like Frodo and Sam!" Rereading that, I suddenly thought, "Or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza!" -- but I refrained from posting that because, never having actually read Don Quixote, I owe to cultural osmosis whatever superficial idea I may have of the Don and his squire and thus can't really say how similar they may or may not be to the characters in the Mozart opera.

Anyway, my curiosity was piqued enough that I read a few paragraphs of the Wikipedia article on Sancho Panza, and I was intrigued to find this: "Sancho's wife is described more or less as a feminine version of Sancho, both in looks and behaviour" -- obviously calling to mind Papageno and Papagena ("But what if Sarastro had set aside for you a girl who was just like you in colouring and dress?").

Shortly after suddenly becoming (mildly) interested in that particular Cervantes character, I happened to read Oswald Wirth's short chapter on the 16th Tarot trump, "The House of God," which depicts a tower struck by lightning. Wirth ends this chapter thus:

When this arcan[um] ceases to be unfavourable, it puts one on guard against what it threatens. Salutary fears, reserve, timidity which preserves one from ill-considered risks; simplicity of mind remote from errors of learning, common sense, the wisdom of Sancho Panza.

Sancho Panza again! The context of a House of God being struck by lightning also seemed to be a link to Papageno -- who is told, inside the Temple of Isis and Osiris, "Papageno, whoever breaks silence in this place is punished by the gods with thunder and lightning."

"The wisdom of Sancho Panza" -- and did Papageno have any wisdom to offer? Suddenly I thought of an anecdote I had heard years before from a philosophy professor.

The professor, wishing to demonstrate how easily we fall for logical errors, gave his class this syllogism: "All men are mortal. Socrates is mortal. Therefore, Socrates is a man" -- and asked them if it was valid. They rose to the bait and said that it was. The professor then presented a logically equivalent syllogism: "All birds are mortal. Socrates is mortal. Therefore, Socrates is a bird" -- and asked what they thought of that. Not valid, said one of the students. The professor asked why. "Because Socrates doesn't have feathers."

Simplicity of mind remote from errors of learning.