The “esoteric rack” problem
Well I admit when reading a book by Paulo Coelho for the first time – it has been recommended to me – I did not know what to think of his way of narrating a story and his trips to transcendental. I had my hands on “Fräulein Prym and the demon” at that time. I was reading the book during a trip through Libya. I like it somehow but was not enthusiastic about it. After a while a friend of mine recommend another book of Coehlo to me “Eleven minutes”. I also like this book, but once again I did not find it magically. I kind of told myself that I was brought up in the parenting style of occidental rationality, i.e. everything that cannot be proved or calculated, i.e. logical in a sense, cannot be or is simply a feeling – and well, some kind of feelings cannot be right either.
Still, from time to time I borrowed a Coelho book from the city library, i.e. “Brida“. I realized once again that Coelho did not convince me entirely with his concepts, however I began to ingest myself more into it.
However it took me another five years until this summer I discovered “The Alchemist” and “Aleph“. Once again the books accompanied me on a holiday trip. One evening I had one of the books with me lying on the supper table. One of the fellow travellers spotted it there and commented that he did not like the style Coelho writes books (the guy is natural scientist!). I suddenly discovered that I had changed my mind in the meantime: I could handle Coelho by now by simply opening myself to it. The idea to deal with myself and the thought that not everything in live can be explained by rational means – even though we love to believe it. A quote displays what I mean: review of Coelhos book “Aleph” shows: “Aleph does not only tell the story of a journey across a continent but also of a journey to the past. And that is not the childhood or the adolescence but a former life. It seems that Paulo Coelho can go back to his former lives, looking for foregivness for a commited sin back then.”
Coelho says:
“Life means to leave the beaten tracks, to set off and to discover oneself a new.”
Does not sound to queer to me, maybe only unfamiliar, but that does not mean it has to be wrong.
