For my last post on Cervantes and his “invention of fiction” before handing in my finished manuscript, I wanted to return to one of the most influential interpretations of his work in the twentieth century: that of Michel Foucault.

The notion that philosophers have their heads in the clouds is one of the oldest in the book. Make that a specific book; as Alexander George points out in a recent contribution to The Stone, Aristophanes used it to ridicule Socrates in The Clouds.

« Pourquoi donc y a-t-il des fleurs ? » Pourquoi ? Pour rien. Parce que. La beauté des fleurs est là, c’est tout. Pour rien. Et sûrement pas pour nous. Mais voilà : nous y sommes sensibles, et cela, ce n’est pas rien.

Who wants more reality? Not the culture we live in, if we are to believe the current trends that made "Avatar" a  hit and finances' fictitious dream-making our burden.

We live in an era of blogs, tweets, aggregators, and Fox News. It's quite easy to exist in an ideological/cultural/sociological/psychographic bubble of your own making--one that entirely reinforces your existing systems of belief. That's why I start every morning with the Wall Street Journal.

The incapacity of the mind–or rather of the Western mind culturally trained to succeed and strive–to conceive of reality. We are not taught to see what is, but to dream, long, hope, desire, strive, reach for a perfection (physical, intellectual, financial, social) that does not exist outside of our projections and the standards of the society where we are born.