...and this being true, I'll do what I want, and doing what I want, I'll do what I like, and doing what I like, I'll be happy, and when a man is happy he doesn't wish for anything else, and not wishing for anything else, that'll be the end of it...The uneducated Sancho Panza is using a sophisticated rhetorical device, the climax or gradatio. For other examples see:
...y, siéndolo, haría lo que quisiese; y, haciendo lo que quisiese, haría mi gusto; y, haciendo mi gusto, estaría contento; y, en estando uno contento, no tiene más que desear; y, no teniendo más que desear, acabóse...
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, February 26, 2019
The Ladder of Happiness
Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter L (tr. Edith Grossman):