Photo: The Times of India
The early history of wisdom unfolded on the road.
Stephen Hall, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience
In his Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, Stephen Hall rightly notes that “[t]he quest for wisdom is a physical as well as intellectual undertaking. It often requires changes in scenery, thrives on commerce (which often promotes an exchange of ideas), and usually involves a journey” (26). Thinking of Socrates’s visits to the Athenian elite, Confucius’s travels in exile, and the Buddha’s post-awakening peregrinations, Hall concludes that “the early history of wisdom unfolded on the road” (26).
One can say much the same of several of our most important narrative genres. The history of the verse epic, from The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey to The Divine Comedy, was indelibly marked by a hero’s journey. Earlier novels traced the travels of a Don Quixote, Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe or Tom Jones. Later long-form novels, of which I have already discussed several, more explicitly yoked the protagonist’s physical displacement with a journey toward character realization and elaboration of an ethic, typically facilitated by transformative experience, such as loss, suffering, humiliation, social crisis, or war. As for the history of film, its key early milestones include the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train and George Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon.
Photo: Helen Maybank, Royal Shakespeare Company
Understanding how the journey motif intersects with both the acquisition and propagation of wisdom means paying attention to three related journeys:
- The physical journey that characters undertake, in embarking on a quest, visiting another culture, and/or migrating to another land;
- The complex cognitive and ethical journeys those characters experience over the course of the narrative; and
- The reader’s or viewer’s own journey along wisdom’s several dimensions, as the story unfolds.
This post, and the two that follow, focus primarily on the first two of these elements. The following set of posts—on wisdom and the experience of cultural dislocation—foregrounds the third.
We begin with two highly lyrical and relatively traditional quest novellas—Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. Although both works are replete with wisdom dialogues and are the product of authors seeking forms of truth outside their home culture—in Muslim North Africa for the Brazilian Coehlo, in India for the German-Swiss Hesse—they nonetheless prioritize what Hesse famously called “The Way Within.” The Alchemist is a classic quest narrative that yokes the coming into oneself with penetration to the Soul of the World and the acquisition of a partner in love. Siddhartha tracks its protagonist’s more dialectical wisdom quest in parallel with the life journeys of several other characters, with the example of the wandering Buddha rarely far from mind. My final subject text, Chris Marker’s brilliant film Sans Soleil, breaks out of the “way within” paradigm by couching the journey to wisdom as an encounter with radical otherness and using poignant images of everyday culture gleaned on the filmmaker’s travels to constitute a truly global filmic consciousness.
Widely considered the masterwork of Brazilian author Paolo Coehlo, The Alchemist tells the story of an Andalusian shepherd—named Santiago, but referred to throughout as “the boy”—who dreams that if he travels to the Egyptian pyramids, he will find a hidden treasure. Shortly after this dream, the boy meets an uncannily omniscient old man named Melchizedek, who identifies himself as the King of Salem. Urging the boy to pursue his “Personal Legend” near the Egyptian pyramids, Melchizedek tells him never to forget that our fate is what we make of it and that “when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it” (31, 24). He then leaves the boy with two stones ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible—Urim and Thummim—to consult whenever he is unable to read natural omens.
Although initially hesitant to leave his sheep and a wandering life that he loves, the boy makes the first of a series of “risky bets” in traveling across the Mediterranean to Tangier, where he is immediately struck by the strangeness of the local language and prayer rituals (112). Here, he encounters the first of many obstacles on his quest when he is defrauded by a young man who promises to guide him to the Pyramids in a day’s time and thus comes to recognize that he sees “the world in terms of what [he] would like to happen, not what actually does” (43).
On learning from the stones that he is indeed fated to realize his Personal Legend, the boy encounters a crystal merchant who had given up on his own dream, to travel to Mecca for the hajj. Over the course of nearly a year, the boy works for the merchant, learns Arabic and the trade in crystal, revolutionizes the merchant’s business, and puts aside enough money to continue his quest. As he leaves Tangier, he recognizes that his sheep had long since taught him that “there was a language of the world that everyone understood… the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose” (64).
Among those in the caravan that takes him east across the desert, the boy meets a bookish Englishman intent on finding a famed alchemist at the Al-Fayoum oasis so as to learn the universal language and the mysteries of the Philosopher’s Stone. Throughout Coehlo’s narrative, this Englishman will serve as a foil for the boy’s growing conviction that one learns the alchemical Language of the World from experience, “in one’s daily life,” not from books (78, 84).
Photo: Brittanica
Once at the oasis, the boy meets a young unmarried woman, Fatima, whom he takes to be his “twin soul” and “the omen he had been awaiting… all his life” (96). Love, he quickly concludes, is the “pure Language of the World”—one that “everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart” (95f.).
Wandering out in the desert, his heart overflowing, the boy spies two hawks fighting and takes this for an omen that, against all tradition, the oasis will be attacked the next day by a warring tribe. He conveys the omen to the oasis’ leaders and, not for the last time in the novella, finds that his life has been staked on the strength of his powers.
It is here that the boy meets the alchemist, who foretells misery should he abandon his quest, saying that “we suffer terribly” when we “are afraid to pursue [our] most important dreams” (123, 134). After the boy’s omen proves correct, he continues on his quest, accompanied by the alchemist. Insisting contrary to the Englishman that “only one way to learn… [is] through action,” the alchemist tells the boy that “before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way” (129, 136).
As they cross the desert, the alchemist and the boy experience several such tests. The boy undergoes the ultimate of these tests when the travelers are captured by a warring tribe and the alchemist commits the boy, again upon pain of death, to demonstrate in three days’ time that he can transform himself into the wind. On the third day, in dialogue with the desert, the sun, and the wind, the boy manages to conjure up a fearful sandstorm and thus is recognized by the alchemist as his “perfect disciple” (158).
When the boy and the alchemist come within sight of the pyramids, the boy spots a scarab beetle, takes it as an omen, and begins digging for his treasure. While digging, however, the pair are accosted by a band of refugees, one of whom speaks of having had a recurring dream that is the exact geographical inverse of the boy’s and told of a treasure buried at the starting point of the boy’s quest in the fields of Spain (167f.). The boy then returns home and, at the very spot on which he had dreamed of finding treasure by traveling to the pyramids, unearths a chest full of Spanish gold coins and precious gems, “the spoils of a conquest that the country had long ago forgotten” (170). By bringing his quest full circle in this way, he realizes a destiny foretold obliquely by a story that Melchizedek had told him, the moral of which is that a “shepherd may like to travel, but he should never forget about his sheep” (35). The tale ends with the boy’s catching the scent of a well-known perfume and the “touch of a kiss” on the wind from Africa and then responding, “I’m coming, Fatima” (171).
The Alchemist is frequently included on lists of books exemplifying wisdom. It is not hard to see why. Over the course of his quest, the boy engages in two significant wisdom dialogues with mentor figures, Melchizedek and the alchemist, supplemented by his increasing ability to tap into the wisdom of the natural world through dialogues with the desert, the wind, and the sun. Alchemy, as the boy comes to understand it, involves an “immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s all written there” (76f.). Alchemy is “about penetrating to the Soul of the World, and discovering the treasure that has been reserved for you” (141). The conversion of lead into gold, the aim of the Englishman’s quest, is but the symbol of a more fundamental alchemical evolution—namely, that “when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too” (155). Love, exemplified here by the bond between the boy and Fatima, is not only what drives the eternal cycle of life in the desert and elsewhere, it is “the force that transforms and improves the Soul of the World” (150, 155). True alchemy, in short, is fundamentally simple (86). In its purest form, it is not what is found in the alchemist’s laboratory or in the Englishman’s weighty tomes so much as what can be found in the heart that “goes in search of its dreams” or inscribed “on the surface of an emerald”—alchemy’s Emerald Tablet—understood as a “direct passage to the Soul of the World” (134, 131).
Photo: Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris Scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica atque Technica Historia
Individual readers will have to decide how compelling they find Coehlo’s mystical version of wisdom. I, for one, am too much the secular rationalist to be much swayed by the implications of the novella’s culminating moment: “The boy reached through to the Soul of the World, and saw that it was part of the Soul of God. And he saw that the Soul of God was his own soul. And that he, a boy, could perform miracles” (157). Despite a superficial resemblance to the position of those who, after Aristotle, insist that wisdom can only be acquired through experience and action in the world, the alchemist’s vision of wisdom locates it squarely in the divine, and only by reflection and immersion in human subjects: “God created the world so that, through its visible objects, men could understand his spiritual teachings and the marvels of his wisdom. That’s what I mean by action” (131).
To return to what I have argued to be wisdom’s constituent markers, The Alchemist only scratches the surface when it comes to exploring cross-cultural differences or ethical complexities. Its plot offers several occasions for readerly empathy—most notably, when the boy loses his fortune by being swindled or robbed—but these reversals of fortune are quickly resolved to his benefit through faith and persistence. It speaks of love as fostering the common good, but without explicitly showing how the boy’s attainments will transform his world. The tale exemplifies intellectual humility only to the extent that human wisdom is seen to be subservient to that of God and the Soul of the World.
Above all, perhaps, The Alchemist falls short to the extent that it does not invite the reader to become an active participant in the construction of meaning; there is no wisdom dialogue here between the reader and the text. As readers, it often seems, we are simply along for the ride.
Photo: John Williams Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus (detail)
I read the novella’s enigmatic Prologue along these lines. In it, the alchemist picks up a book that tells of the legend of Narcissus. In this version, several goddesses of the forest visit the lake in which Narcissus dies to find it “transformed into a lake of salty tears” (1). They ask the lake why it weeps for Narcissus, to which the lake replies: “I weep for Narcissus… because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected” (2). Presumably, the alchemist finds this version, with its reversal of the legend’s traditional agency, to be a “lovely story” because it exemplifies the fundamental oneness of the Soul of the World (2). But I cannot help but see Narcissus as a reader, shut out by a self-reflective logic in which, like the pool of water in most versions of the myth, she is reduced to the status of vehicle, not active agent.
