When I was writing last night, I totally failed to mention a book that I immediately fell in love with. I was writing a paper about it this morning and wanted to share it.
The book is called "the Alchemist"
One theme found in this book (similar to Harry Potter and the Boggarts) is the perception/attitude of what you are going through. The main character in the book, Santiago, is a shepherd in Spain who has recurring dreams (like mentioned in the article), and has them translated by a gypsy. She says that his dreams are telling him to travel to Egypt to the pyramids. The next day, he meets a man named Melchizedek, who is a king, and who also tells him that it is his “personal legend” to travel to the pyramids. He sells his entire flock of sheep and pays 10% to Melchizedek, and who also gives him two stones called ‘urim and thummim (interesting). What follows is a string of unfortunate events, as he is robbed, must work for a year (if I remember correctly) to save money to make it to Egypt, and once he gets there, he is faced with his biggest fears, but throughout the entire book, he is determined to set out to see what his purpose in life is, and keeps a positive attitude and perspective through it all.
For the next theme, Santiago learns that this life is more about doing more than we want to do. As I mentioned earlier, Santiago must work for an amount of time to save money because he is robbed. He works for a merchant who sells crystals. Throughout his time with the merchant, he has dreams about the store, and how to increase business. As he does this, he makes more and more money and only has to work for 6 months, and is even richer than before. He longs greatly to return to Spain and buy his flock back and return to a comfortable life. He consults the urim and thummim which Melchizedek gave him, and he realizes that this life is not about being comfortable; it is about doing what we came here to do. I can identify with this, and I think we all can, because there are probably a lot of things that we don’t really want to do, but we must in order to realize our potential. Santiago continues his journey.
The last theme I want to discuss from the book isn’t identifiable in one or two words, so I will explain it. Santiago travels and finds an alchemist who teaches him much about the world around them. The alchemist does not give Santiago all the answers, but let’s Santiago search within himself for answers. At the end of the book (to make a long story short), Santiago gets to the place where his dreams take place, and starts to dig, looking for treasure. Two men stop him, and beat him nearly to death, and he tells them of his dream. Realizing that he probably has no money, they leave him alone, but before they do, one of the men makes fun of Santiago telling him to be more practical and tells him of a dream that he had of a tree in Spain with treasure buried below. Santiago realizes that the tree the man speaks of is the tree near the place where he used to tend his sheep, and everything comes together for him at that moment. He realizes that he his treasure was where he started, but he didn’t know how to find it. He realizes that the whole trip was so he could discover who he was, find love, and recognize what is most important to him. He returns to Spain, gets his treasure, and then returns to the oasis in Egypt where he met his true love who waits for him. The theme to me is that the journey is what we need. We want to get somewhere so bad, but in this story, once he gets there, he realizes that it isn’t where he wants to be-but it was necessary because it helped him grow. I feel similar to Santiago, because sometimes I feel like I’ve been sent on a wild goose chase, only to discover I’ve always had what I needed, but unless I had taken that journey, I never would have realized it.
This is an amazing book, and it has been sold in almost every country of the world. There are many parallels to the gospel, and themes that we can adapt for our lives.
It is an easy and WONDERFUL read. Enjoy!
