Like the Flowing River: Thoughts and Reflections
Paulo Coelho
Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Be like the flowing river, Silent in the night.
Be not afraid of the dark.
If there are stars in the sky, reflect them back.
If there are clouds in the sky, Remember, clouds, like the river, are water, So, gladly reflect them too, In your own tranquil depths.
Manuel Bandeira
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Epigraph
Preface
A Day at the Mill
Prepared for Battle, But With a Few Doubts
The Way of the Bow
The Story of the Pencil
How to Climb Mountains
The Importance of a Degree
In a Bar in Tokyo
The Importance of Looking
Genghis Khan and His Falcon
Looking at Other People's Gardens
Pandora's Box
How One Thing Can Contain Everything
The Music Coming from the Chapel
The Devil's Pool
The Solitary Piece of Coal
The Dead Man Wore Pyjamas
Manuel Is an Important and Necessary Man
Manuel Is a Free Man
Manuel Goes to Paradise
In Melbourne
The Pianist in the Shopping Mall
On My Way to the Chicago Book Fair
Of Poles and Rules
The Piece of Bread That Fell Wrong Side Up
Of Books and Libraries
Prague, 1981
For the Woman Who Is All Women
A Visitor Arrives from Morocco
My Funeral
Restoring the Web
These Are My Friends
How Do We Survive?
Marked Out to Die
The Moment of Dawn
A January Day in 2005
A Man L ying on the Ground
The Missing Brick
Raj Tells Me a Story
The Other Side of the Tower of Babel
Before a Lecture
On Elegance
Nha Chica of Baependi
Rebuilding the House
The Prayer That I Forgot
Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro
Living Your Own Legend
The Man Who Followed His Dreams
The Importance of the Cat in Meditation
I Can't Get In
Statutes for the New Millennium
Destroying and Rebuilding
The Warrior and Faith
In Miami Harbour
Acting on Impulse
Transitory Glory
Charity Under Threat
On Witches and Forgiveness
On Rhythm and the Road
Travelling Differently
A Fairy Tale
Brazil's Greatest Writer
The Meeting That Did Not Take Place
The Smiling Couple (London, 1977)
The Second Chance
The Australian and the Newspaper Ad
The Tears of the Desert
Rome: Isabella Returns from Nepal
The Art of the Sword
In the Blue Mountains
The Taste of Success
The Tea Ceremony
The Cloud and the Sand Dune
Norma and the Good Things
Jordan, the Dead Sea, 21 June 2003
In San Diego Harbour, California
The Art of Withdrawal
In the Midst of War
The Soldier in the Forest
In a Town in Germany
Meeting in the Dentsu Gallery
Reflections on 11 September 2001
God's Signs
Alone on the Road
The Funny Thing About Human Beings
An Around-the-World Trip After Death
Who Would Like This Twenty-Dollar Bill?
The Two Jewels
Self-Deception
The Art of Trying
The Dangers Besetting the Spiritual Search
My Father-in-law, Christiano Oiticica
Thank You, President Bush
The Intelligent Clerk
The Third Passion
The Catholic and the Muslim
Evil Wants Good to Prevail
The Law of Jante
The Old Lady in Copacabana
Remaining Open to Love
Believing in the Impossible
The Storm Approaches
Some Final Prayers
More about Paulo Coelho
Author Biography: Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho The Witch of Portobello
Heron Ryan, 44, journalist
Life is a journey
Feeling inspired?
Also by Paulo Coelho
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
When I was fifteen, I said to my mother: 'I've discovered my vocation. I want to be a writer.'
'My dear,' she replied sadly, 'your father is an engineer. He's a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?'
'Being someone who writes books.'
'Your Uncle Haroldo, who is a doctor, also writes books, and has even published some. If you study engineering, you can always write in your spare time.'
'No, Mama. I want to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books.'
'But have you ever met a writer? Have you ever seen a writer?'
'Never. Only in photographs.'
'So how can you possibly want to be a writer if you don't really know what it means?'
In order to answer my mother's question, I decided to do some research. This is what I learned about what being a writer meant in the early 1960s:
(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.
(b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
(c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of 'most complicated book': the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read.
(d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: 'Einstein is a fool', or 'Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.' Everyone is scandalized, but they nevertheless go and tell other people that the theory of relativity is bunk, and that Tolstoy was a defender of the Russian aristocracy.
(e) When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.
(f) Given his vast culture, a writer can always get work as a literary critic. In that role, he can show his generosity by writing about his friends' books. Half of any such reviews are made up of quotations from foreign authors and the ot
her half of analyses of sentences, always using expressions such as 'the epistemological cut', or 'an integrated bi-dimensional vision of life'. Anyone reading the review will say: 'What a cultivated person', but he won't buy the book because he'll be afraid he might not know how to continue reading when the epistemological cut appears.
(g) When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of.
(h) There is only one book that arouses the unanimous admiration of the writer and his peers: Ulysses by James Joyce. No writer will ever speak ill of this book, but when someone asks him what it's about, he can't quite explain, making one doubt that he has actually read it.
Armed with all this information, I went back to my mother and explained exactly what a writer was. She was somewhat surprised.
'It would be easier to be an engineer,' she said. 'Besides, you don't wear glasses.'
However, I did already have the untidy hair, a packet of Gauloises in my pocket, the script of a play under my arm (The Limits of Resistance, which, to my delight, a critic described as 'the maddest thing I've ever seen on stage'); I was also studying Hegel and was determined, somehow or other, to read Ulysses. Then a rock singer turned up and asked me to write words for his songs, and I withdrew from the search for immortality and set myself once more on the same path as ordinary people.
This path took me to many places and caused me to change countries more often than I changed shoes, as Bertolt Brecht used to say. The pages that follow contain accounts of some of my own experiences, stories other people have told me, and thoughts I've had while travelling down particular stretches of the river of my life.
These stories and articles have all been published in various newspapers around the world and have been collected together at the request of my readers.
A Day at the Mill
At the moment, my life is a symphony composed of three distinct movements: 'a lot of people', 'a few people', and 'almost no one'. Each of them lasts about four months of the year; and although there is often a little of each during one particular month, they never get confused.
'A lot of people' is when I'm in touch with the public, with publishers and journalists. 'A few people' happens when I go back to Brazil, meet up with old friends, stroll along Copacabana beach, go to the occasional social event, but mostly stay at home.
What I want to do today, though, is to talk a little about the 'almost no one' movement. Right now, night has fallen on the two hundred inhabitants of this Pyrenean village, whose name I prefer to keep secret and where, a short while ago, I bought a converted mill. I wake every morning at cock-crow, have breakfast, and go out for a walk amongst the cows and the sheep and the fields of maize and hay. I look at the mountains and - unlike during the 'a lot of people' movement - I never think about who I am. I have no questions and no answers; I live entirely in the present moment, knowing that the year has four seasons (yes, I know this may seem obvious, but we do sometimes forget), and I transform myself just as the countryside does around me.
At the moment, I'm not much interested in what's going on in Iraq or in Afghanistan: like anyone else living in the country, the most important news is the weather forecast. Everyone who lives in the small village knows whether it's going to rain, whether it will be cold or very windy, since this directly affects their lives, their plans, their harvests. I see a farmer working in his field. We wish each other 'Good morning', discuss the likely weather, and then go on with what we were doing - he with his ploughing, me with my long walk.
I come back, look in the letter-box, and there's the local newspaper: a dance in the neighbouring village; a lecture in a bar in Tarbes - the nearest big city with its forty thousand inhabitants; last night, the fire brigade was called out because a litter bin was set on fire. The subject agitating the region at the moment is a group thought to be responsible for cutting down a line of plane trees along a country road because they blame the trees for the death of a motorcyclist. This news takes up a whole page, and there are several days' worth of articles about the 'secret cell' that wants to avenge the boy's death by destroying the trees.
I lie down by the stream that runs past the mill. I look up at the cloudless sky in this terrifying summer, during which the heatwave has killed five thousand in France alone. I get up and go and practise kyudo, a form of meditation through archery, and this takes up another hour of my day. It's lunchtime now; I have a light meal and then, in one of the other rooms in the old building, I suddenly notice a strange object, with a screen and a keyboard, connected - marvel of marvels - by a high-speed line, also known as a DSL. I know that the moment I press a button on that machine, the world will come to meet me.
I resist as long as I can, but the moment arrives, my finger presses the on-switch, and here I am again connected with the world: Brazilian newspapers, books, interviews to be given, news about Iraq, about Afghanistan, requests, a note that my plane ticket will arrive tomorrow, decisions to be postponed, decisions to be taken.
I work for several hours, because that is my choice, because that is my personal legend, because a warrior of light knows that he has duties and responsibilities. But during the 'almost no one' movement, everything on the computer screen seems very far away, just as this mill seems like a dream when I'm caught up in the other movements - 'a lot of people' and 'a few people'.
The sun is setting. I switch the computer off again, and the world goes back to being the countryside, the smell of grass, the lowing of cattle, the voice of the shepherd bringing his sheep back to the pen beside the mill.
I ask myself how I can exist in two such different worlds in one day. I have no answer, but I know that it gives me a great deal of pleasure, and that I am happy while I write these lines.
Prepared for Battle, But With a Few Doubts
I'm wearing a strange green outfit, full of zips, and made from a very tough fabric. I have gloves on, too, in order to avoid cuts and scratches. I'm carrying a kind of spear, almost as tall as I am. The metal end has three prongs on one side, and a sharp point on the other.
And before me lies the object of my attack: the garden.
With the spear in my hand, I start to remove the weeds growing amongst the grass. I do this for quite a while, knowing that each plant I dig up will die within two days.
Suddenly, I ask myself: am I doing the right thing?
What we call a 'weed' is, in fact, an attempt at survival by a particular species that took Nature millions of years to create and develop. The flower was fertilized at the expense of innumerable insects; it was transformed into seed; the wind scattered it over the fields round about; and so - because it was not planted in just one place, but in many - its chances of surviving until next spring are that much greater. If it was concentrated in just one place, it would be vulnerable to being eaten, to flood, fire and drought.
But all that effort to survive is brought up short by the point of a spear, which mercilessly plucks the plant from the soil.
Why am I doing this?
Someone created this garden. I don't know who, because when I bought the house, the garden was already here, in harmony with the surrounding mountains and trees. But its creator must have thought long and hard about what he or she was doing, must have carefully planted and planned (for example, there is an avenue of trees that conceals the hut where we keep the firewood) and tended it through countless winters and springs. When I moved into the old mill - where I spend a few months of each year - the lawn was immaculate. Now it is up to me to continue that work, although the philosophical question remains: should I respect the work of the creator, of the gardener, or should I accept the survival instinct with which nature endowed this plant, which I now call a 'weed'?
I continue digging up unwanted plants and placing them on a pile that will soon be burned. Perhaps I am giving too much thought to things that have less to do with thought and more to do with action. But, then, every gesture made by a human being is sacred and ful
l of consequences, and that makes me think even more about what I am doing.
On the one hand, these plants have the right to broadcast themselves everywhere. On the other hand, if I don't destroy them now, they will end up choking the grass. In the New Testament, Jesus talks about separating the wheat from the tares.
But - with or without the support of the Bible - I am faced by a concrete problem always faced by humanity: how far should we interfere with nature? Is such interference always negative, or can it occasionally be positive?
I set aside my weapon - also known as a weeder. Each blow means the end of a life, the death of a flower that would have bloomed in the spring - such is the arrogance of the human being constantly trying to shape the landscape around him. I need to give the matter more thought, because I am, at this moment, wielding the power of life and death. The grass seems to be saying: 'If you don't protect me, that weed will destroy me.' The weed also speaks to me: 'I travelled so far to reach your garden. Why do you want to kill me?'
In the end, the Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita comes to my aid. I remember the answer that Krishna gives to the warrior Arjuna, when the latter loses heart before a decisive battle, throws down his arms, and says that it is not right to take part in a battle that will culminate in the death of his brother. Krishna says, more or less: 'Do you really think you can kill anyone? Your hand is My hand, and it was already written that everything you are doing would be done. No one kills and no one dies.'
Encouraged by this recollection, I pick up my spear again, attack the weeds I did not invite to grow in my garden, and am left with this morning's one lesson: when something undesirable grows in my soul, I ask God to give me the same courage mercilessly to pluck it out.
The Way of the Bow
The importance of repetition
An action is a thought made manifest.
The slightest gesture betrays us, so we must polish everything, think about details, learn the technique in such a way that it becomes intuitive. Intuition has nothing to do with routine, but with a state of mind that is beyond technique.
So, after much practising, we no longer think about the necessary movements: they become part of our own existence. But for this to happen, you must practise and repeat.
And if that isn't enough, you must repeat and practise.
Look at a skilled farrier working steel. To the untrained eye, he is merely repeating the same hammer blows; but anyone who follows the way of the bow, knows that each time the farrier lifts the hammer and brings it down, the intensity of the blow is different. The hand repeats the same gesture, but as it approaches the metal, it understands that it must touch it with more or less force.