I’d love to have dinner with Don Quixote. I wouldn’t expect a particularly reliable dinner companion, but the conversation could be magnificent. I would serve something modest and unmistakably real. Perhaps a good roast, bread, wine, and a rather too serious dessert, while Don Quixote transformed the meal into an episode of chivalric history. The roast would become a captured giant, the waiter a suspicious innkeeper, and the bill, no doubt, an enchanted document issued by hostile sorcerers.

I would mostly let him talk. Beneath the absurdity lies one of literature’s most uncomfortable questions: is it better to see the world as it is, or to see what it might become if one refuses to surrender one’s ideals? I would probably argue with him about the difference between noble imagination and self-deception. He would probably accuse me of being insufficiently courageous. Sancho Panza would probably agree with me, but only after asking whether there was more wine.

That would be the perfect dinner: one man defending reality, another defending the impossible, and both discovering, somewhere between the main course and the bill, that neither can quite live without the other.

© Dominik Alexander / 2026