Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

This line appears at the outset of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in the narrator’s account of how an otherwise unremarkable minor gentleman of La Mancha becomes obsessed with chivalric romances. Cervantes frames Alonso Quijano’s transformation into “Don Quixote” as the result of an imbalanced life: nights spent reading tales of knights-errant, days neglected, and sleep sacrificed. The remark functions as a comic, mock-medical explanation for his ensuing delusions and sets the satirical tone of the novel, which targets the cultural craze for chivalric fiction in early modern Spain and the gap between literary fantasy and social reality.

The sentence compresses Cervantes’s satire into a single, vivid causal chain: excessive immersion in books, coupled with physical deprivation, produces a mind unmoored from reality. On one level it is a humorous exaggeration—brains do not literally “dry up”—but it also signals the novel’s central concern with how stories shape perception and behavior. The line suggests that reading without judgment, rest, or grounding in lived experience can become a kind of self-induced enchantment. At the same time, Cervantes invites sympathy: Don Quixote’s “madness” is born from idealism and longing for meaning, even as it leads him into comic misadventures.