Tilting at Windmills

The windmills on the hill behind town look small from down below, but when you get up close they are HUGE.  Gigantic and most definitely not natural features on the landscape.  Whenever I see them up close I think of the Cervantes character Don Quixote.  The guy from literature who is famous for mistaking windmills for giants and jousting or 'tilting' with them.

I looked up Don Quixote on Wikipedia and found the following quote:

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."

"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.

"Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length."

"Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone."

— Part 1, Chapter VIII. Of the valourous Don Quixote's success in the dreadful and never before imagined Adventure of the Windmills, with other events worthy of happy record.

'Tilting at windmills' has become synonymous for fighting off imaginary foes - a romantic cluelessness.  In college I took a class about Medieval 'Romance' Literature where we learned all about knights etc - Don Quixote was the last book we read.  By the time it was written Chivalry was dead and 'Knights in Shining Armor' were very much obsolete. They had become a joke. The longbow, firearms, and mass infantry tactics had long since made knights obsolescent, but they still saw themselves as important.  Anyway, that's the point of 'Tilting at Windmills'.

But when I look up at those windmills I can see why Don Quixote was so confused.  They do look like giants.  Giants grinding away to turn wind into electricity - no longer used to turn the millstone and make flour.  But their arms are still 2 leagues long, and up close there is the whirring whoosh of the blades cutting the air, and every once in a while the cranking noise as gears engage and turn the heads of the giants.

I really do believe they are giants.  But rather than joust with them I am content to let them grind away and keep the lights on.  Patrick