Book Review in Lit3

THE ALCHEMIST
By Paulo Coelho
New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993
ISBN # 0-06-250218-2
This is a lovely book, tender but profound. It is about the importance of seeking ones own
meaning of life and spending ones life fulfilling it. Coelho calls it seeking ones Personal
Legend. It reminds me very much of what the Existentialists would have called authenticity.
However, unlike the Existentialists who write rather darkly about this process of seeking ones
own meaning system, Coelhos young shepherd boy is seeking his Personal Legend in something
much like a fairy tale. However, Coelho at least gives us a process and set of obstacles we might
well expect, and his hero fulfills all four:
First one must discover that our lives are dictated by custom, family, law and tradition and we
must be willing to overcome these in order to seek our own unique Personal Legend.
If we get to this first stage we may well run up against love as an obstacle, particularly in
believing that in order to have the love of some other we must give up our own Personal Legend
and live in a way that the other needs for us. On the authors view this is a mistaken notion of
love.
You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he
abandons that pursuit its because it wasnt true love .. the love that speaks the Language of the
World.
Supposing one gets past that second stage and realizes love is not incompatible with ones
Personal Legend, then one is likely to run into grave difficulties in realizing this legend and be
tempted to give up. It is just too hard. But that would be the great tragedy of ones life, one
would have given up what makes life worthwhile in order to avoid the hardships perhaps
required to get there.
My heart is a traitor, the boy said to the alchemist, when they had paused to rest the horses. It
doesnt want me to go on.
That makes sense, the alchemist answered. Naturally its afraid that, in pursuing your dream,
you might lose everything youve won.
Well, then, why should I listen to my heart?
Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard
what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what youre thinking about
life and about the world.
You mean I should listen, even if its treasonous?
Treason is a blow that comes unexpectedly. If you know your heart well, it will never he able to
do that to you. Because youll know its dreams and wishes, and will know how to deal with
them.
Shortly after this, they return to this hard subject of discouragement and seeming failures:
My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer, the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked
up at the moonless sky.
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has
ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a
seconds encounter with God and with eternity.
Every second of the search is an encounter with God, the boy told his heart. When I have
been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous, because Ive known that
every bout was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my
treasure, Ive discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the
courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve.
Finally, when one has embraced all the hardships and fought for and discovered ones Personal
Legend, then one is likely to run into the fourth and last obstacle: guilt. We look around us and
see that so many others have not achieved this Personal Legend and we become embarrassed that
we have and tend to want to deny it or hide it. This too is an obstacle we must overcome. And so
we follow this shepherd boy in sort of a pilgrimage from stage one through the final achievement
of his Personal Legend. It takes him far from home, through many adventures, failures and
successes, and changing notions of what his own Personal Legend is after all.
Coelho writes a beautiful and moving legend of the boys journey and enlightenment. I did find
the title rather odd. There is an alchemist in the novel whom the shepherd boy meets and who,
indeed, helps him in many ways and actually sort of makes the shepherd boy into an alchemist
himself. But the use of the definite article the in the title seems a bit confusing. It would seem,
on Coelhos account, that anyone who actually achieves his or her Personal Legend becomes
an alchemist, changing the baser life we have from birth into the gold of our own Personal
Success. But this is a journey upon which any person may embark.
On the other hand Coelho seems right to me in bringing in the influential alchemist whom the
boy meets in the north African desert. I think most of us who have seriously undertaken this
journey meet people along the way who teach us and inspire us toward this mysterious and even
occult route toward our Personal Legend. Im 70 now and still on my journey, and like the boy,
have arrived at various stages I once was almost sure were arrival points, only to discover
another stage of enlightenment along the way.
Everyone who is such a seeker should read this optimistic book of one who seems to have
succeeded in the process of turning a potentially base life into a golden achievement, a true
alchemists conversion.
Romeo jay L. Sibud

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THE ALCHEMIST

Romeo jay L. Sibud

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