Personal Legend

Sometimes, you just know.

Soundes like a cliche, doesn't it? When you're looking for a job, or a mate, you hear those words and you think, What a crock. How could you just know, when you've been looking for one for the longest time, with all the tools in your hand - and still no closer to the intended?

On the other hand, when you use those four words to describe the first time you read a book... it suddenly makes so much sense. You pick up a volume, not knowing anything about what's inside except for an expectation of greatness between covers... and the next thing you know, you're in bed, hanging on to dear life for the final paragraphs, wondering how God has placed this book right in your hands.

That's how I felt when I - after years of resistance and hesitation - finally picked up The Alchemist.

Before I go on, however: I am not one of those freaks who regard this book as some sort of self-help bible or personal manifesto of life. Nor am I going to be the kind of person who's going to force this book on you with a promise that it will change your life OMG!!!111!!!! Fact of the matter is, I picked up The Alchemist without any knowledge of the book's plot or message - and, okay, because part of me wanted to be cool.

In a sense, reading The Alchemist reminded me of the first time I picked up The Catcher in the Rye - the lack of anticipation, coupled with the mystery of picking up something that I had only heard about but never really known. Then again, picking up Salinger at the age of 14 isn't the same as picking up Coelho as a grown but vulnerable adult, in that awkward holding period between graduate school and the professional world.

Say what you want about The Alchemist, but I've personally found that reading this - and Coelho's works in particular - took on a certain quality that I can vouch for but never describe adequately. There's the romanticism, of course, and inspiration... but it goes beyond how our world currently defines "romance" or "inspiration," as something that can easily be picked up from watching enough episodes of Oprah. This is not the kind of comfort that anyone can boil down into bite-size quotes to post on a Facebook profile; in my case, it spoke to my own deep secrets and deeper truths, to the point where I didn't just want the book to end -- I wanted to live inside that story, to find my own way through the desert in search of my Personal Legend.

It's not the first time I had a strong reaction to Coelho. I still remember the time I picked up Eleven Minutes - absentmindedly, to be honest - and found myself getting way more absorbed than I should be, as if I was reading a stack of intimate love letters belonging to a stranger. The same goes for the time I tried, and failed, to read The Fifth Mountain - I felt like I was intruding on a personal conversation or internal memo, for which I may have to pay with my life if I were to even lay my eyes on a single line.

Perhaps The Alchemist really was the right book at the right time - although it shouldn't have been, given that I had just finished Chronicles of a Death Foretold and was hoping that my next book would be much frothier than the Coelho. (As it goes, the chick-lit novel I had chosen for that purpose remains unfinished.) Perhaps I am not as deep as a reader as I thought I would be, considering that I'd choose a fable of a shepherd boy looking for his Personal Legend over yet another heavy fictional tome full of allegories.

Or maybe I just knew it all along.