Feb 12. It's still snowing. I wander around the apartment. I watch the snow. I drink a cup of tea. It's as good a time as any to pick up Edith Grossman's 2003 translation of Don Quixote.

On the second page, Don Quixote loses his mind. I stay in bed all afternoon, reading and laughing.

Feb 13. I feel a kind of wild happiness as I turn the pages of this book. Out the window of the library, the world is a melting mess.

Poor Don Quixote, getting tangled up with a wretched prostitute whose breath "undoubtedly smelled of yesterday's stale salad."

Feb 14. The faces on the subway are closed up and bleak, pressed into tabloids, prayer books, A Million Little Pieces, or gazing off into tangled, wintry thoughts. It's Valentine's Day. A kid comes through the car selling Jolly Ranchers.

I read Chapter XXXVI, "Which recounts the fierce and uncommon battle that Don Quixote had with some skins of red wine, along with other unusual events that occurred in the inn."

The train is delayed. We're stuck underground. I'm the only one laughing.

Feb 15. Through the vent, I can hear the wind howling. I'm in the bathtub, reading Don Quixote and laughing, not just laughing, but LAUGHING, I mean really laughing.

Feb 17. Tonight Sara and I watch Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up. I am shaken and awed by this film. Like Don Quixote, it tells a story of a profound transformation. Its self-conscious style does not diminish its emotional power; they deepen and enrich each other. Cervantes mastered the tension between deep irony and deep feeling—four hundred years ago.

Feb 19. I walk through Union Square Park, sucking a Jolly Rancher. Nobody is sitting on the benches—it's too cold out—except for a junkie, asleep. He nodded out right in the middle of rolling a cigarette. Another junkie on the path touches his toes, bouncing a bit.

I finish Book One while leaning against a tree.

When Don Quixote is brought back to his village, I'm reminded of my grandfather before he died. Don Quixote's niece and housekeeper are so happy to see him, but he just "stared at them, his eyes transfixed, and did not understand where he was."

Feb 21. "Everything is artifice and mere appearance," Don Quixote proclaims at the beginning of Book Two, "devised by the evil magicians who pursue me."

Feb 22. At three in the morning, when the wind is blowing frozen rain against the windows, I'm in my living room, drinking chocolate tea and laughing. I want to wake up Sara and tell her that Don Quixote just interrupted a puppet show and destroyed the puppets and wrecked the set and almost killed the puppeteer, because he's convinced that it's his duty to defend all ladies and all lovers—even if they're only puppets. But Sara has a busy day tomorrow. I let her sleep.

Feb 25. I'm in the laundromat. The man sitting on my right reads the New York Post ("Trump Blows His Top" the front-page headline says); the woman sitting on my left watches a show about the life of Snoop Dogg, which is blasting on the TV above the washing machines. I imagine Don Quixote looks a little like Snoop Dogg, if Snoop Dogg were older and white and wore armor instead of fur—"dry, tall, thin, his jaws kissing each other inside his mouth." While I wait for my clothes to dry, I sit between these two strangers, reading Chapter LVII, "Which recounts how so many adventures rained down on Don Quixote that there was hardly room for all of them."

Feb 27. Again and again, he is ridiculed, humiliated, abused, and battered by the world—he is pushed off his horse, his ribs are broken, his teeth are knocked out, his face is smashed, he's vomited upon, trampled by bulls, by pigs, but never—not till the breath is gone forever—does he fail to rise.

Feb 28. This is the most joyous book I have ever read. I finish it in tears.