Free Saving Simon by Jon Katz Page B

Tao of the donkey, their inner and dominating spirit. There is something mystical about them. They are loyal, affectionate, intuitive, hardy, patient, stubborn. They are also unique among domesticated animals in that they work andlive closely with humans, and become powerfully attached to them, but they never turn themselves completely over to us. There is a part of them that is beyond us, that they won’t surrender, a kind of dignity and independent spirit that most domestic pets have lost in order to survive.
    There is no other animal I can think of that has been awarded such a spiritual aura by human beings. Donkeys are not just tied to Christianity; the donkey is also frequently portrayed as a loyal, wise, and enduring animal in the history of Judaism, in both the Old Testament and in the Kabbalah, the journals of the Hebrew mystics.
    In the Kabbalah, donkeys are the wisest of living things; they often appear carrying prophets and mystics who challenged bewildered rabbis about the teachings of God. Often, the donkeys are overworked or mistreated and neglected by their masters, but they are important symbols of faith, suffering, wisdom, and commerce. Whenever they appear, ideas are exchanged; wise men and prophets are on the move. Donkeys are often used as stand-ins for the poor and unfortunate in the Kabbalah, and God and his prophets and angels are always exhorting people to treat them well.
    Artists as diverse as Shakespeare, Chagall, and Orwell have all been drawn to the symbolism of the donkey and featured the animal in their work. Donkeys have been portrayed in famous paintings carrying Hannibal, Napoléon, and Queen Victoria on their backs. A donkey is the subject of the only novel in Latin that has survived complete from the era of the Roman empire.
Asinus Aureus
by Lucius Apuleius (born A.D. 124) features a protagonist who becomes a donkey and experiences the hardships and simple faith of that animal.
    One of the most original literary works ever conceived,
The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la
Mancha
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is also a great work of donkey literature. Published in the early seventeenth century,
Don Quixote
features animals who take political or moral positions; their actions speak to their nobility, weaknesses, and strengths. Like humans, they are imperfect creatures filled with contradictions.
    In Cervantes’s work, animals are not background characters; they are significant protagonists. Two of the book’s four central characters are equines: Don Quixote’s old horse, Rocinante, and Sancho Panza’s beloved donkey, Dapple.
    Without Rocinante and Dapple,
Don Quixote
is hardly a book at all. In the globe-trotting satiric commentary, the two equine companions are mirrors of the men who ride them into every imaginable predicament and misadventure. From battling giants who assume the form of windmills, being beaten by liberated prisoners, and falling for one Dulcinea after another, to wandering through wild and inhospitable mountain ranges, Rocinante and Dapple get them through.
    Dapple’s donkey diaries are one of the most inventive creations in literature—a chronicle not only of Spain in the seventeenth century but also of human beings who reveal themselves to be the sum total of many lunacies, great dreams, lost loves, and weeping hearts. Dapple endures, loves, rises and falls, lives and dies with every twist of the human’s fortunes. It is the donkey who defines the man who rides him.
    This then, is the theater of chance: man turning himself over to the loyal animal, trusting him through unimaginable challenges, confiding in him as a trusted soul mate.
    When Sancho Panza thinks he had lost Dapple, he falls apart, giving way to endless doleful lamentations. He knows he had been diminished and does not believe he can make the journey alone.
    I relate to this deeply—the story of Sancho Panza and Dapple. I believe that Simon came to define at least a part