What I thought would be a short and sweet fable here from Paulo Coelho, suggested to me for my monthly Book club, has actually hit rather closer to home than I expected. So much so in fact that after reading it once in less than a day, I read it again the day after, I then purchased the audiobook so that I could have Jeremy Irons growl it to me for another go over on my way into work. I think I’m probably going to read it again tomorrow too because it has been such a long time since I read something that’s spoken to me on quite such a personal level.
The entire point of this website, of the overall project I’m undertaking in keeping this going is so that I can provide myself with a creative outlet, something that I personally feel is where my best skills lie. If I’m brutally honest with myself it’s also probably a bit about showing off too but mainly it’s to prove a point, as the tagline says on the homepage, it’s to prove that I am more than the 9-5 that I could so easily let define me.
And yet often it doesn’t feel like enough.
An ex-girlfriend once told me, on the day of our sad breakup, that I had lost my sense of adventure. At the time I took this as merely a lashing out at the end of our relationship. Nevertheless though, this off handed observation stuck with me, it’s clung into me and often makes me look twice at everything I’ve done in the three years since that sentence was said. Often it makes me worry, often I feel like it’s not true, the variation is day-to-day, circumstance-to-circumstance. Have I lost that sense of adventure I once held so personally important? Have I failed to realise my ‘personal legend’ as Paulo Coelho would put it? I suppose the point of books like this is to make you ask these questions of yourself and in the asking hopefully seek out some answers.
Knowing this was a fable from the outset made reading this all together easier, clichés were expected and disbelief was suspended in favour of seeking out a message, I just didn’t realise that this message would be the same one which that ex had so neatly dug in between my ribs. This fable appeals to the unfulfilled, to those of us who lie awake at night and think ‘is this it?’ It appeals to the person that sits at their desk and plots imaginary adventures that they might take if ever they one day make the money, or just pluck up the courage. It appeals to the person whose amazon wish-list is basically comprised of a whole load of travel equipment and nowhere to take it.
Strangely though, the message that we actually receive is one that we all already know it’s - (spoiler alert) - that the journey, the experience of discovering your treasure, of searching for your personal legend through trial and tribulation is often more rewarding, more effectual and more realising than the actual discovery of the treasure itself - and that through this journey of perseverance you are more likely to achieve what you always dream of. I mean, pick up any £2 self-help book from the bargain bin at WHSmith and you’ll get the same message repeated to you over and over by some half-cut psychologist with a collapsing family life. So what makes Coelho’s interpretation so intriguing?
Well for one instance he actually succeeded in achieving his own dream through this exact philosophy, with this exact book. The initial publishing run of the Alchemist was a disaster, it was through a relatively unknown Brazilian house ‘Rocco’ which only ran an initial print of 900 copies and didn’t reprint. This failure drove Coelho to want to move out of Rio where he lived with his wife but instead he spent 40 days wandering through the Mojave Desert. This journey of self-discovery led him to return renewed and go out to realise his ‘personal legend’ - namely to become a writer. After years of hard graft and perseverance, literally knocking on doors, it was finally picked up by HarperCollins and since has become an international bestseller, with more than 65 million copies being sold worldwide; not bad as far as discovering your treasure goes.
For a second instance it’s portrayed in such a way that it feels like a genuine adventure whilst reading. Many ‘stories with meanings’ feel preachy, pummelling point after point into you until you’re a little punch drunk and disassociated from the story. Not so here, the flow and narrative structure lets you move with the character, wanting to know what happens next as the meaning unfurls beneath you, being coaxed and teased from the story as you grow with the character of the young man. When establishing a meaning behind a story it is far more effective to slip it in behind a good narrative than it is to ram it down your throat, take it from Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception’, it’s better to think you’ve discovered the matter for yourself rather than have it slap you in the face. (It’s also great if Leonardo DiCaprio is sleeping next to you when you do.)
This isn’t to say that the Alchemist doesn’t have its faults. I enjoyed it greatly as it trod the line between the implied supernatural and realistic, showing the meaning in mundane actions whilst implying some form of external guidance. This was sadly broken by a scene later on which felt as though it was a little out of place, dragging the story into the realms of high fantasy where it could have remained as an implication throughout the story and still have the same effect as this passage hoped to achieve. That being said, even this scene has its own relatable imagery, as far as an epiphany goes it’s very much a good representation of sudden realisation, the way pieces feel as though they fall into place, the discussions had with your internal self and the wider world personified. Often the dialogue falls short, realistic interactions replaced by slightly jarring conversation that no humans would ever truly have. Then again though, the conversations of Aesop’s famous fables are the same, one-upmanship witty one liners paired to extensive emotive monologues rather than more natural flowing back and forth, it’s simply part of the genre.
In short though (as the book is) this book is about helping people to realise something in a manner that may not have been immediately clear to them. It’s about providing an adventurist narrative that then couples to an important meaning, a self-discovery and realisation of what potential you have if you only go to look for it. It’s difficult to read for someone like me, for people who live in a dichotomy of reality where we’re both creative and mundae, struggling to find a purpose to settle on. Perhaps it’s human nature, perhaps everyone feels the same way, but if we don’t take those steps into the desert, if we don’t embark on our journey and talk to our hearts then how will we ever know? How will we ever discover our own personal legends?
I know one thing: it’s unlikely to be in an excel spreadsheet hunched over a desk. Maybe it’s time to go catch that sense of adventure again.