The Alchemist

 

Santiago is a shepherd. He loves his flock, though he can’t help but notice the limited nature of the sheep’s existence. Seeking only food and water, they never lift their heads to admire the green hills or the sunsets. Santiago’s parents have continually struggled for the basics of life and have smothered their own ambitions accordingly. They live in beautiful Andalucia, which attracts tourists to its quaint villages and rolling hills, but for them it is no place of dreams.

Santiago, on the other hand, can read and wants to travel. He goes into town one day to sell some of his flock and encounters a tramp-king and a gypsy woman. They urge him to “follow his omens” and leave the world he knows. The gypsy points him toward the Pyramids of Egypt, where she says he will find treasure.

Crazily, he believes her. He sells his flock and sets sail. Sure enough, disaster is met early on when a thief in Tangier robs him of his savings. So much hard work and discipline for a little adventure! But strangely, Santiago is not devastated, apprehending a greater feeling—the security of knowing that he is on the right path. He is now living a different life, in which every day is new and satisfying. He keeps reminding himself of what he was told in the market before he left: “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

 

This belief is a marvelous one, a support for anyone embarking on a major project. Nevertheless, is it a hope based on nothing? If you think about the energy you put into something once you are committed to it, probably not. The “universe conspiring” to give you what you want is, more precisely, a reflection of your determination to make something happen. In reading The Alchemist, we are reminded of Goethe’s demand: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it—boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

 

The book does not get away from the fact that dreams have a price, but, as Coelho has noted in interviews, not living your dreams also has a price. For the same money, he said, you can either buy a horrible jacket that doesn’t fit or one that suits you and looks right. There will be difficulties in whatever you do in life, but it is better to have problems that make sense because they are part of what you are trying to achieve. Otherwise difficulties merely seem insidious, one terrible setback after another. Dream followers have a greater responsibility, that of handling their own freedom. That may not seem like such a price, but it does require a level of awareness that we are maybe not used to.

The old man that Santiago meets in the town square tells him not to believe “the biggest lie,” that you can’t control your destiny. You can, he says, but you must “read the omens,” which becomes possible when you start to see the world as one. The world can be read like a book, but we will never be able to understand it if we have a closed type of existence, complacent with our lot and unwilling to risk anything.

 

The Alchemist is remarkable for being a love story that renounces the idea that romantic love must be the central thing in your life. Each person has a destiny to pursue that exists independently of other people. It is the thing that you would do, or be, even if you had all the love and money you want. The treasure that Santiago seeks is of course the symbol of the personal dream or destiny, but he is happy to give up on it when he finds the woman of his dreams in a desert oasis. Yet the alchemist he meets in the desert tells him that the love of his oasis girl- friend will only be proved real if she is willing to support his search for treasure.

Santiago’s dilemma is about the conflict between love and personal dreams. Too often we see a love relationship as the meaning of our life, but the obsession with romantic coupling can cut us off from a life more connected with the rest of the world. But surely the heart has needs? Live your life around the dream, Coelho says, and their will be more “heart” in your life than you can now comprehend:

 

 

Romantic love is important, but it is not your duty—that is to pursue your dream. Only through devotion to the dream is the “soul of the world” revealed to us, the knowledge that destroys loneliness and gives power.

 

So much of the self-help literature is about pursuing our destiny, but dreams do not always pull us along by their own force; they speak persistently but quietly, and it does not take too much effort to smother the inner voices. Who is willing to risk comfort, routine, security, and existing relationships to follow something that to others looks like a mirage? It takes courage, and dog-eared, stained copies of Coelho’s classic have become the constant companion of people who need to make fearless decisions daily in order to keep true to a larger vision.

 

Coelho grew up in a middle-class family in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become an engineer, but after stating his wish to be a writer Coelho was put in and out of mental institutions for three years. He became a hippie traveler, joined a cult in Italy for a while, and was held and tortured by the Brazilian police after a stint writing “subversive” lyrics for a rock band.

Coelho is one of the world’s bestselling authors. The Alchemist, which was inspired by a tale in The Thousand and One Nights, has sold 20 million copies (his first publisher dropped it after selling fewer than 1,000 copies, but Coelho managed to find another one).

Coelho is a Catholic and has a particular interest in pilgrim routes. Santiago de Compostela in Spain provides the setting for both The Pilgrimage and Diary of a Magus. Other books include The Valkyries: An Encounter with Angels, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, and Veronica Decides to Die. He lives with his wife Christina, a painter, in Rio de Janeiro.