A question of who had done the reading

Ours was a stern weekend, 

first with Virginia giving

away a done deal football

game against some denizens

of the Delta, and then giv-

ing it away to them again

with a last-minute penalty

inscribed in the ninth cir-

cle of a dimmer sphere.

By the time the Ryder Cup

had sailed for Europe yet

again, it seemed as if we

did deserve our politics.

It put one in mind of an ap-

praisal of Tobias Smollett's

translation of Don Quixote, 

suggested by Carlos Fuentes,

on its re-appearance in print

some time ago: believing the

world is what we read, and

discovering that the world

reads us. Our politics does

believe that it reads the

world, notwithstanding that

so few of us can believe it.

It's enough to make one care-
ful of how we're being read.

Miguel de Cervantes

The Adventures of

  Don Quixote de la Mancha

Tobias Smollett, translation

1755
Carlos Fuentes, introduction

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986©