Aleph by Paulo Coelho
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Since I finished The Aleph, the first thing I do in the morning, every morning, is to meditate on death. I say to myself, “Today might be the day I die.” I list different ways I could die that day. Heart attack. Stroke. Car accident. Sudden inexplicable violence.
What should I do with this day? What would be worth it even if I died? If I died, is there anything today I would regret?
As the Hagakure says, “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.”
This kind of thing is probably a good idea even if you don’t espouse any particular religious beliefs. It’s been more than two months, and I’m still doing this particular little ritual. It’s been good for me.
It makes it easier to ignore distractions.
One way to review a book is to talk about how it affected your life. That’s probably a better way than intellectual analysis. Or at least different. That’s what I’m doing here, but it’s a tricky proposition. My spiritual beliefs are very different from Paulo Coelho’s. And The Aleph didn’t prompt any change in those beliefs. He’s mistaken about the specific experiences he relates, in my opinion.
I find myself skeptical of the content of The Aleph, yet affected by it. That’s an awkward position. I have an excuse, though: The things I’m skeptical about aren’t the things that affected me.
The protagonist narrator is deeply and consistently committed to spiritual things. It seems as though he lives every day with spiritual reality in mind. That inspired me.
I know it’s not real. Paulo Coelho himself doesn’t live with a consistent eye to the spiritual. But that doesn’t make the art less inspiring.
A novel can convey a sense of the relative importance of things. The communist novel obsesses over class relations. The romance novel obsesses over relationships. The spiritual novel obsesses over spiritual things. For any day depicted in The Aleph, the most important thing that happens that day is the spiritual thing. That doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t compel any change in behavior. It only shows that Paulo Coelho has certain concerns. It’s just the eye of the novelist picking things out.
But shouldn’t I be living as though such an eye was on my own life?