Cervantes wrote an old man on a bony horse, a rusted lance in his hand, who saw the windmills standing in a field and charged. His squire shouted after him — they're windmills, they're windmills — and the old man looked back and said something about doing battle with the great windmill of life. Everyone agreed he was mad. Every time I read it, I feel something closer to envy: the willingness to charge at a thing simply because it has weight in your chest, with no thought of whether it pays. Past a certain age, after you've seen enough, that turns out to be the rarest thing a person can hold onto. I took the old man with me to Spain — a few days in Barcelona, then a flight, on a whim, to Mallorca.