Today’s Story That Matters is big and familiar: Don Quixote. First published in 1605, it has certainly lasted. And though most of the stories we consider important are serious, tragedies rather than comedies, this one is practically slapstick.

To call the entire novel a “story” isn’t quite correct. It’s a collection of hundreds of stories. The form is called “picaresque,” which is a novel shaped like barbed wire, to my mind, a straight line of existence studded by pointy little clusters of conflict.

For those who have just landed on the planet, I’ll summarize the basic plot. A country gentleman named Alonso Quijada is addicted to reading fantasy stories about knights, dragons, wizards, maidens, and such. The fact that this genre is still wildly popular 500 years later says something about our need to dream, and no doubt these stories hold survival information, as Don Quixote proves, even as it critiques and satirizes the genre. Quijada is a kind of everyman, rich enough to not have to work, at least not much, but also a provincial nobody. His life is boring and fairly meaningless. Desperate, or just mentally ill, or most likely driven crazy by ennui, he decides he’s going to be a “knight errant,” just like the heroes he reads about, and changes his name to Don Quixote de la Mancha. That’s the plot. He outfits himself with a DIY knight kit--armor, horse, squire—and sets out looking for trouble. He finds it, everywhere, mainly in the form of his delusions colliding violently with reality. It’s really funny, and slyly touching. Above all, despite the fantastical conceit, it’s grounded in material reality, and the fun and interest come from the constant clash between the world and our higher ideals about it. The information in this sprawling novel, repeated in story after story, is crucial in two ways: 1. If we don’t find meaning in our lives, we will invent it, or perish. 2. We must always be reminded to not take ourselves so seriously. Life is a comedy, Don Quixote tells us, even as he imagines it as a tragedy.

While pretending to be a knight, Quixote’s goal is always the same: to protect the vulnerable. This is the role, the answer to my mind, for those of us who have enough surplus wealth and power to spare after taking care of our personal and family needs. When we fail to do this, to matter to other people, we fall into fantasy or despair. That’s how I read the novel at least.

The danger of finding meaning by helping others is that it almost inevitably leads to grandiose ideas about ourselves. This is when sanity must reassert itself, clear thinking. Every one of us is more Alonso Quijada than Don Quixote, and we’d do well to remember that. That thing on our head is not a helmet but a barber’s basin; the giant we just fought is a windmill. At the end of the novel, Quijada’s sanity completely returns. He renounces his life as Don Quixote and all those ridiculous books (as he seems them at the end), wills his belongings to his family and servants, and peacefully dies. Even so, a heroic verse is written on his tombstone, and nobody would wish he’d lived his entire life as a forgettable and frankly worthless country gentleman. His audacity, his madness, created meaning in his life, though reality kept humbling him, over and over. In the end, he’s at peace. He found the right balance.

I’ll close with a joke by George Carlin. He’s talking about U.S. state mottos, contrasting “Live Free or Die,” and “Famous Potatoes.” Somewhere between these, he said, lies the truth. And I get the feeling it’s closer to Famous Potatoes.