Things haven't changed since the times of Cervantes (and Shakespeare.) The dreamer gets involved in those silly old tomes, the ones that speak to his dreams and his subconscious. He hoards the olde books of chivalry, and eventually--how'd ole' Miquel put it--they make his head soft, and he dreams up the idea that he is a knight of those old words, more or less a writer.

And so the old knight, armed with his delusions, strikes out at the modern world, the world of windmills, practicalities that bleed in on his existence, the world of information demanded by that early and lasting form of artificial intelligence, the market economy. His is a battle of remembering the things that will be forgotten, outmoded by the latest, silly to hold on to.

The knight sets out to catalog, as a botanist might, the intrinsic habits of a humanity, a humanity striving towards decency and a broader mind. He is gifted with memory, or else we wouldn't even have the tale written about him, which is of course Don Quixote itself.

It comes as no surprise, maybe Cervantes was not the best person to assign to tax collecting, that early bombardment of the officialdom of reaching information. But, he had it right about the issue the modern complicated world, forgetfulness, the voice that comes and tells Poland, 'no, forget your silly books and ideas of nationality and character and genius; you no longer exist.'

And over in Britain, Shakespeare, makes, perhaps, a personal choice of a move that was not quite cleanly one of 'moving up in the world,' but a position that allowed him to capture the great wild untamed varied voice (democratic) of people.