The story behind the words

The Man Who Had Every Reason Not To

Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes, attributed to Juan de Jáuregui, c. 1600

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra — portrait attributed to Juan de Jáuregui, c. 1600 · Public domain

Spain, 1580. A man of thirty-three disembarks at Valencia after five years of slavery in Algiers. He had been captured by Barbary pirates on his return from the naval Battle of Lepanto, where a musket ball had permanently maimed his left hand. Four escape attempts in captivity. His family had borrowed the ransom money. He comes home to nothing: no position, no income, no recognition for his service. Over the next twenty-five years he will work as a tax collector, be imprisoned at least twice, and write in almost total obscurity. He is fifty-seven years old when he publishes Part I of Don Quixote. It becomes the most celebrated novel in the Spanish language. He will be dead within eleven years of finishing it.

"Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness — its opposite — never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes." — Miguel de Cervantes · Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 38

The short version of the quote carries the whole argument. Diligence — steady, applied, persistent effort — is not merely useful or advisable. It is, Cervantes proposes, the very origin of good fortune. Not luck, not talent, not circumstance: the mother. The metaphor is pointed. A mother is a source, the cause from which something is born. Good fortune, by this reading, is not stumbled upon. It is generated.

The full sentence adds its sharper edge: idleness never brought any person to the goal of their best wishes. Not rarely. Not seldom. Never. The second clause forecloses the exception entirely, and in doing so removes the comfortable escape of hoping that results will somehow arrive without the work. It is worth noting that Cervantes places this line in Don Quixote's mouth as a common proverb — old wisdom already in circulation by the early 1600s. He did not coin it. He gave it a home in the greatest novel in the Spanish language, and from there it traveled into permanent use.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) understood idleness from the inside — not because he practiced it, but because circumstances offered him every reason to. He wrote for decades without recognition, in poverty, with a maimed hand, after years of captivity. He kept writing. Don Quixote is considered by many scholars the first modern novel in the Western tradition and has been called the greatest work of fiction ever written. He died in Madrid in April 1616 — the same week, by a remarkable coincidence of calendars, as William Shakespeare.

What are your best wishes — and what would diligence toward them look like today?