Change comes from within

No real change on the practical front today. This week's been spent dealing with exigencies and, when the exigencies have died down enough for me to notice I'm stressed out, destressing with a jigsaw puzzle. So this seems like as good a time as any to talk about the pertinence to my trip of what is probably the best-selling novel you've never heard of (at least of the last century of Western literature): a Brazilian story called The Alchemist.

I know! I hadn't heard of it either until a few months ago. But Wikipedia says it's sold more copies than The Da Vinci Code and has been translated into sixtysome languages from the originial Portuguese. Mind you, I was suspicious; I had heard that the book was as much philosophy and self-help as literary fiction, so I was afraid that The Alchemist would turn out to be the unholy offspring of The Secret and Atlas Shrugged, a ridiculous pseudo-religious tract disguised by a thin veneer of plot.

And in a way that's what it is... but it turns out to be pretty darned good anyway. Atlas Shrugged and The Secret are each annoying because they beat you over the head with their dogmas of moralism and magical thinking respectively; The Alchemist, on the other hand, is basically just a self-conscious folk tale, as though Joseph Campbell had sat down to write a novella illustrating the point of the hero myth. What's most central to the story is the idea of a "personal legend." It's not quite the same thing as a destiny, though it's close; it's more like a dream specific to you, the pinnacle of your potential in your own mind, which you can reach or not depending on whether you can muster the courage to face the obstacles that await you, the strength to overcome them, and the wisdom to learn from them. There is a pseudo-religious gloss on all of it, but I take it in the spirit of the folk tale; after all, perhaps it's true that when a person has the courage to accept the call to the journey and sets his sights on achieving his "legend," the world takes on a new significance that could almost be called religious.

Is Lover's Lanes a personal legend? Sure it is. It's a journey of the hero in the best Campbellian sense, as I suggested yesterday: a dangerous voyage with uncertain risks and rewards, which in the end must be undertaken not to gain anything in particular but for its own sake. I'm following my bliss -- or at least I hope this will prove to be my bliss. It might be better to say I'm following my gut. And while I doubt I'll find the secret to eternal life along the way as the medieval alchemists hoped, I might at least find the secret to living well.