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People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
During the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Clavileño episode of Don Quixote was used to highlight the new and strange realization that man was capable of breaking his earthly bonds and hurling himself at great speeds across immense distances. In 1962, Luis Cavanillas Ávila published "Don Quijote y Sancho: Los primeros 'cosmonautas' del mundo" where he compared Sancho's description of events from his flight on Clavileño to the first testimony the world received from Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin upon returning from his orbit of earth: "Que el despegue de la tierra para ascender al cosmos hay que realizarlo mediante un cohete, era ya cosa que nos había dicho Cervantes al hablarnos del Clavileño" (88). Cavanillas Ávila also quoted Luis Méndez Domínguez's transmission from Washington, D.C. to Spain that reported Gagarin's "fabuloso viaje," which is surprisingly similar to Don Quixote's in the Cave of Montesinos:
El cielo era negro y no azul. Un ciclo entero de las veinticuatro horas en tierra fue cumplido por este mozo en noventa minutos escasos. Sol, luna y estrellas desfilaron en tres cuartos de hora. No parpadeaban las estrellas, que jamás desaparecen en realidad como si se tratara de telón de teatro simulando inmutable cielo. Amanecer y puesta de sol cada noventa minutos: vistos a través de una doble densidad atmosférica y reflejada en colores insospechados. Ni verano ni invierno para Gagarin dentro de su nave. Ni alternaciones de temperatura, ni lluvias, ni tormentas, como el hombre conoce. (89)
Gagarin's experience and observations were, of course, based on several scientific principles of physics that accounted for the spaceship's velocity in orbit and its remoteness from earth, which afforded the distant vantage point to view the changes imposed on the planet. It nonetheless has an interesting parallel with the knight's testimony in the cave where he claims that time passed with such speed that there seems to be no need to eat or use the bathroom.
Time in Don Quixote is fleeting and illusory. Both the narrative sequence of events and the psychological time frame of the protagonists are often inordinate and...