The reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted

“The reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted” is the opening of a courtship conceit that Don Quixote reads with such fascination that he lies awake trying to unravel it. Its significance lies in the knot it makes of reason: a declaration of love presents itself as an explanation, yet turns explanation into a maze, embodying the verbal excess that captivates him and helps draw him away from his everyday life.

The Phrase in Context

Don Quixote delights in the courtships and challenges contained in books of chivalry, especially the writings of Feliciano de Silva. The narrator gives the full conceit as an example of the passages he admires: “the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty;” The repeated return to reason makes the sentence circle around its subject rather than clarify it: love is framed as an affliction, and the speaker’s appeal to reason is itself caught in the very disorder it claims to explain.

Style and Effect

The line builds its effect through repetition and paradox. “Reason” appears as both the instrument meant to make sense of the speaker’s condition and something weakened by that condition; “unreason” becomes the force that interrupts the promised logic. The formal ingenuity is inseparable from its comic difficulty. Don Quixote treats such complicated conceits as pearls, but their density also leaves him awake, laboring to extract a meaning that the sentence keeps twisting back on itself.

Don Quixote’s Response

His attachment to this kind of writing has practical consequences. He neglects field sports and the management of his property, and sells acres of land to buy more books of chivalry. He spends his leisure absorbed in reading, and the effort to understand passages like this one becomes part of the larger infatuation that consumes him. The narrator sharpens the point by observing that even Aristotle, were he alive again for the purpose, could not have made out or extracted the meaning. The conceit thus serves both as a miniature of the romances’ ornate language and as evidence of how completely Don Quixote has surrendered his attention to it.