The intermediate beings
Mircea LazarescuABSTRACT. Starting from a concise review of the issues raised by the quest of the hero in Don Quixote, we explore the complex relations between fiction and reality, mental constructs and their projections in the real world, text, mental representation and the concrete space-time continuum. The questions are numberless, the heroes are infinitely versatile, the spaces of the human mind hosting all of these volatile entities – literally without boundaries. More often than not, people mold their destinies by being guided by heroes of stories or myth – the essential question then is: who is more real, the man who hosts in his mind and heart the hero, becoming the latter by psychic projection, or the hero who thus re-enters reality after having been generated by the same? Put otherwise: who experiences whom, the man the hero, or the hero the man? Whichsoever the answer to this riddle, something seems certain: the meeting inside man between heroes and the individuality of man opens vast, practically unbounded, horizons of creativity which are multidimensionally formative for human personality in its dialogue with itself and the collective in which the heroes, i.e., the intermediate beings, live and are transformed from generation to generation. pp. 45–54
Keywords: Don Quixote; imaginary versus real; illusion versus reality; reality-generating logos; mankind meeting in heroes; man/life in the agora.