The dictum applies to every aspect of life. Any problem that has a solution can be solved by the good people (and made worse by the bad people). The good people are those who are both supremely competent at what they do —whether it’s friendship, dentistry, lawyering, or whatever else you need doing— and exceptionally kind.

It’s tempting to get near someone who seems great at what they do but is indifferent to kindness at best or vicious at worst. Don’t. People who are uninterested in being kind are often also uninterested in being honest, and you might find yourself with a con artist, meaning you’ve struck a relationship with someone who is both incompetent and unkind, a bad deal if there ever was one. (And it seems to me that con artists are much more prevalent than I thought in my more naïve twenties. Is that just me?).

But let’s say they are indeed as competent as they seem. The chances are high it’ll end up badly, because brilliance without kindness turns from an asset to a liability. When things go sour —and things do tend to go sour in the vicinity of ruthlessness— you can end up all alone in your hour of need, or worse, with a competent enemy. If you’re going to acquire an enemy, better that they not be the smartest cookie. Between the values of competency and kindness, kindness rules supreme.

Don Quixote is superb at finding the good people and letting the good people find him. Arguably, his greatest achievement in the whole book is recruiting Sancho Panza, his loyal, hilarious, and wise squire and side kick. Without Sancho, Don Quixote would be little more than a lonely madman. But it’s not only Sancho. The priest and the barber are willing to spend days in the forest finding him, going through huge trouble to bring him back home, asking for nothing in return.

And here is what the apparently rational concepts of the survival of the fittest or so-called natural selection miss: none of us would be alive were it not for the kindness of others. The point goes way beyond the observation of care ethics that we’re all extremely fragile as babies, and were it not for the care of others (for most of us, our mothers are the greatest heroes of our stories), we wouldn’t live for very long. In many ways we remain fragile throughout, which makes us depend on the kindness of others to make it through the hardest parts of life. No one survives on their own, no one makes it without being rescued.

Your heart is beating today because a succession of acts of kindness saved the lives of your ancestors, and then your own life. It’s easy to attribute your living to your good genes, the smarts of those who came before you and your own smarts, and no doubt there is something to that, but I bet that if you do some digging, you will find that you are here because you or your ancestors or both were rescued by someone at some point. Maybe you know some of those stories. Sometimes these acts of kindness were done by a professional like a nurse or a doctor. Others they were done by a family member or a loved one. But sometimes, and these are the acts that fascinate me the most, they were done by a stranger who had no apparent stake in the matter, other than kindness. It’s survival through kindness; neither natural nor artificial selection; it’s life by kindness.

My family has preserved some of the stories of the strangers who saved our lives… I will share one such story here, with paid subscribers only, because it’s personal, and it’s a way to thank you for your support, and because I might use that story for something else, so I prefer it being behind a paywall…

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Don Quixote’s world reminds me of my world, from how dangerous it is and has always been to be a woman (how women are always trying to assess whether they are in danger, taking precautions, appeasing threatening men) to the common experience of serendipity in meeting kind strangers who change your life.

One detail that has caught my attention reading Don Quixote is that, when strangers meet, they often entreat one another to tell their story. “Tell us about your good or bad fortune; in us you will find sympathy,” say a group of friendly travellers when meeting a lone woman in the mountains who ends up becoming a major character, Dorotea. More literally, they tell her that in them she will find those who will help her feel her misfortunes. What a wonderful way to approach a stranger. Tell me your story; I will lend a sympathetic ear and in so doing I will make your emotions more bearable, help you come to terms with whatever has happened to you. The woman goes on to tell them about being abandoned by a man, which makes her feel shame that is lessened by her audience’s compassion.

Sharing personal experiences with strangers strikes me as an extraordinary practice, and one that I’ve sometimes taken part in when travelling. There can be a magical covenant of confidentiality and solidarity between travellers, and I have been on both ends of very personal conversations with strangers.

What do you ask the strangers you meet, if you ask them anything at all? Do you choose your questions largely based on social conventions? What would you actually want to ask?

When surrounded by strangers, especially at dinners and parties, I’m often asked what I do for a living or where I’m from. Both strike me as attempts to categorize me as efficiently as possible, locate me in a social map in an effort to assess me. But neither of those questions will get you there; at least not with me.

My job is somewhat representative of who I am. In some ways, I am very much a philosopher. But if you ask questions that are too specific, you’ll force me to talk about AI, which is very much not who I am or what I want to talk about (everyone is talking about AI, after all). I’m also a quirky kind of philosopher —one who writes books for non-philosophers, reads more literature than philosophy, and often finds herself giving talks to companies, government officials, and international organizations. I am also many other things besides a philosopher.

If you ask me where I’m from, there is no easy honest answer I can give you. If I tell you where I grew up, you are more likely to be misinformed than better informed about me. You’ll make inferences about what it means to have been born where I was born that are probably wrong, because I never fit in. I was born a stranger. As Margarite Yourcenar writes in Memoirs of Hadrian, “my first homeland were books.” I grew up with books, in books. I was the kid sitting in the corner of the classroom reading a novel all day long, hardly looking up while the teacher went on and on about something that sounded boring to me.

Although maybe merely a symptom of our practical habit of identifying people for what sets them apart, asking someone where they are from also strikes me as inadvertently designed to “other” foreigners. It’s a reminder in the conversation signalling: “you’re not from here, you’re not one of us.” Fun fact: I have multiple nationalities and when I am interviewed by the press, I’m usually not identified as belonging to the country where I’m interviewed; I’m rarely claimed as “one of our own,” always the other.

What should we ask a stranger, then? Asking someone to tell you their story is very personal, although occasionally I go for it, when I feel there’s enough rapport, and I try to ask it in a way in which the person can answer however deeply or shallowly she wishes. Other times I ask what the highlight of their week is. I love hearing about those gems from people’s lives: a father going to see his daughter skate, a runner watching the sunset with her dog, a busy woman who revels in the bliss of making popcorn and watching old films at night, a secret dancer who keeps his dancing shoes in his briefcase to use after work, a public figure who unwinds in solitude, and many more wonders.

But neither question is what I’d like to be asked by strangers. I have a third question, my favourite to ask and what I want to be asked myself. This one is for you, stranger: What are you reading these days?

After a decade of strangely and painfully forgetting who I was, who I am, or at least an important part of who I am, these days I find myself hungrily wandering through art galleries in wonder. Funny how life can make us lose our way and it can take decades to get back to the place where it all started. I can feel change fermenting within me, some sort of life force finding its way in between the cracks of experience; do you know that feeling?

I went to see the Zurbarán exhibition at the National Gallery in London; if you haven’t seen it and you have a chance to visit, I recommend; this week is your last opportunity. It’s a relatively small exhibition, but that didn’t bother me; quite the contrary; it allowed me to take in each piece with the time and attention they deserve.

The first thing I was struck by was just how many people visit museums every day of every year. Curious crowds; the young and the old, the tall and the short, the quirky and the conventional, speaking different languages, alone, in pairs, in groups of friends, in families, all get together in curiosity and awe to behold great works of art. I’m not sure what that says about humanity, exactly, but it fills me with hope. Every museum goer could be lying on their couch doom scrolling on social media, or trolling someone online, or watching a reality show, or working obsessively, or being the kind of tourist who is interested in more prosaic forms of fun only; but they are not, they are spending a fraction of their lives admiring great art.

There is some sensitivity there, some generosity, some openness that is willing to overcome barriers and borders, tropes and cynicism, and surrender to beauty. There is some magical connection established between the living and the dead, some lessons about what it is like to be a human being at our best. Think about the collective effort involved in preserving, transporting, and visiting those works of art. Perhaps there is room for hope after all.

Throughout the exhibition, what attracted me the most were the sumptuous fabrics and the elegance of beautiful hands rendered in chiaroscuro. That Zurbarán’s time overlapped with that of Cervantes, who I am currently reading, is fortuitous and welcome. He puts images to the words that are populating my reading life.

I’m struck by the darkness in Zurbarán’s painting, the pitch black of shadows. There is one comedic episode in Don Quixote, in Chapter XVI of Part I, in which Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho are staying at an inn for the night. Fuelled by Don Quixote’s delusions and cloaked in darkness, the scene descends into chaos as characters collide with one another, stumble into the wrong beds, and trade blows indiscriminately, while a hapless officer fumbles desperately to light a lamp and make sense of the mayhem. Can you imagine what it must’ve been like to hear sounds in the night and not be able to see and understand their source at the flick of a switch? It reminds me of a long night I spent, a lifetime ago, among the unfamiliar and frightening sounds of the jungle in Vang Vieng, Laos, with a flashlight rendered useless by my forgetting to buy batteries, tortuously waiting for sunrise before I dared to go to the bathroom.

It’s not only light and darkness that were different hundreds of years ago; sound was different too. In her The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces, Susan Tomes makes the point that, not only have instruments changed throughout history, but the whole sound landscape has too: “Ambient noises are different, halls are bigger, listeners sit further away.” (p.34). The world of Cervantes and Zurbarán must’ve been a quieter one too. (While I write these words, the sound of heavy machinery of some kind, undoubtedly sent by mischievous Greek gods with a penchant for irony, blasts through my window while I try to drown it out with Rachmaninoff at full volume). Silence must’ve sounded different.

Back at the National Gallery, as I was marvelling at Zurbarán’s depictions of darkness and silences of times gone by, a piece halted me mid-step and mid-breath. Still Life With Vessels was the painting that hung over my great uncle Oscar’s dining table for as long as he lived. Embarrassingly, I didn’t know it was by Zurbarán. For me, it was a symbol of the calm refuge that was Oscar’s flat, always cool in temperature, with that curious olive carpet, the living room covered from floor to ceiling in books, and not just any kind of books, but beautiful hardback editions of the greatest works humanity has written, in multiple languages too. While my mother walked around fixing his world, I used to spend hours gazing admiringly at his shelves, wondering what secrets, what knowledge, what beauty lay between those covers.

Why had Oscar chosen that painting to occupy the most prominent position in his home? What did it mean to him? What I’d give for a chance to ask him questions. I was too young and he was too old when our paths crossed, but we are kindred spirits nonetheless. Since he was an art admirer, as well as an avid traveller and museum goer, I am certain that he must’ve seen the original painting in the flesh too. How striking, to be standing in front of the same work of art that he must’ve marvelled at, decades ago, in a different part of the world no doubt. I’d like to believe that whatever he felt on seeing it, I feel it too.

An antidote is a counterweight, a substance that can neutralize a poison, a remedy for ills. The more tech conquers our world —from the tools we use to the headlines on newspapers, and even casual conversations— the more undernourished I feel. I’m hungry for substance, for art instead of content, excellence rather than slop, focus rather than overload.

Sometimes an antipode can work as an antidote. What is the antipode of AI? I prescribed a classic novel for myself. I needed an old one. Since I am Spanish (and worrisomely forgetting my Spanish after living in Oxford for too long), the summer is perfect for a big novel, and the story takes place during the summer, I went for Don Quixote, the oldest modern novel, and as far from tech as it gets. It was a good choice. I’m reading the edition my great uncle Oscar had in his library. Its weight comforts me; it reminds me that life can be long and rich. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s already providing the relief I was seeking.

Although we tend to think of classics as highbrow, Don Quixote is a parody, a comedy with a healthy dose of slapstick. Why do we struggle to read classics that were devoured in the past by people who were likely less educated than we are today? Don Quixote was a bestseller.

I suspect that part of the answer is that reading has become less of a social activity. Our ancestors would’ve listened to many of the greatest works on our bookshelves, either in the context of a theatre (Shakespeare, Molière, Lorca), or from the voice of a family member. Reading alone and in silence is a very recent phenomenon. The novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina writes about growing up in postwar rural Spain with his family gathered around his grandfather, who would read aloud in the evenings. Don Quixote was one of three books his family had salvaged from the bonfire of the Spanish Civil War.

The idea of progress, and of technological progress especially, makes us blind to the things we have lost along the way. But it’s helpful to think of what we’ve lost, not to wallow in nostalgia, but because many of those elements are recoverable. I meet many people who would like to read more, who find value in it, but find it hard to do with so many competing stimuli and never ending to do lists.

One suggestion is to read together; the same book or different books, aloud or in silence. Reading the same book has the advantage of inviting conversation, of sharing the same culture. Much like exercising is easier when in a gym surrounded by other exercising people, reading is easier when others in your physical proximity are reading too. I have a friend in Oxford who, instead of watching TV, sits with her family every afternoon, each reading their own book. No wonder her teenager is a voracious reader. Icelanders famously gift each other books on Christmas eve and then gather around the living room to read by candlelight, with a box of chocolates and a glass of appelsín. That may be the best tradition I’ve ever heard of. Someone invite me to Iceland for Christmas, please.

A second suggestion is to read aloud. When I was a teenager, and starting to get into classics, I remember spending hours in my room reading aloud to myself. It makes it easier to focus. We are analogue creatures, and absorbing a book through more than one sense is an easy way to trigger the delicious immersive quality of focused reading. It’s a kind of hypnotic state, partly induced by the internal vibrations of your vocal chords (hence why mantras are used in contemplative traditions), and the musicality of the language. Writers often read their work aloud when editing.

Even reading together and aloud, there might be places in which you struggle, in which you get bored. But overcoming struggle leads to a satisfaction far greater than convenience can ever yield. And boredom creates space for creativity, it teaches patience, it soothes nervous systems frayed by constant notifications. You can also read a contemporary comment about the classic to keep you company.

So don’t hesitate to tackle a classic. It was written for people like you. It’ll speak to you. And the summer is a great time to start.

Perhaps you want to join me in reading Don Quixote. It is a tale for those who have lived enough to have known great pain but who still choose comedy and light over bitterness and shadows. It was written by Miguel de Cervantes, someone who had experienced war, prison, and slavery for five years, and knew well that life is an adventure. It is an ode to freedom, laughter, and idealism.