Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden frames autobiography as a buddy comedy with teeth: the narrator as Don Quixote, swaggering into the story on a rickety horse of self-importance, and the quieter counterweight as Sancho Panza, tethered to weather, appetite, and consequence. It’s funny because it’s accurate. Anyone writing their own life is tempted to cast the “I” as knight-errant - principled, misunderstood, nobly doomed - even when the evidence looks more like improvisation, vanity, or luck. Don Quixote is the Ego’s preferred genre: romance.

Sancho, in Auden’s scheme, is the Self: not the flattering portrait but the stubborn residue of being a person in a body, in time, among other people who remember differently. The Self notices the unpaid bills, the compromises, the pettiness, the awkward pauses between the big scenes. Auden’s trick is to refuse a simple moral binary. Quixote isn’t merely deluded; he’s imaginative, driven, capable of turning life into meaning. Sancho isn’t merely sensible; he’s also self-protective, sometimes cynical, sometimes complicit.

The subtext is a warning about the autobiography’s most seductive lie: that a life has a single protagonist. Auden, writing in a century obsessed with confession, psychology, and public persona, points to the inevitable split between the story we want to be and the person we keep being. The “two characters” aren’t rivals so much as co-authors. Every memoir is negotiation: between aspiration and accounting, myth and metabolism, what sounds heroic and what actually happened.