Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman offer readers a unique view on language development and its inherent role in man and nature. And it is with Emerson’s and Whitman’s expert understanding of language, poetry, and Nature that readers are rewarded with further insight into the world around them.

Some of what Emerson writes in his poem “Nature” reminds me of “The Natural Approach” developed by Tracy Terrell in 1977, developed later along with Stephen Krashen, to language acquisition and development, focusing more on understanding meanings rather than grammar structures; in this method “language is viewed as a vehicle for communicating meanings and messages” (Richards & Rodgers 178, 180).

This is rather different to what Chomsky argued: “Much of human language use is not imitated behavior but is created anew from underlying knowledge of abstract rules. Sentences are not learned by imitation and repetition but ‘generated’ from the learner’s underlying ‘competence’” (Richards & Rodgers 66). However, Chomsky was more grammar oriented than others. One more: “Sociolinguistic competence refers to an understanding of the social context in which communication takes place” (Richards & Rodgers 160).

Emerson touches on these points when he writes: “Words are signs of natural facts” – I believe he is referring to words as meanings and messages – “Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance” (Emerson). Here language, as Krashen and Terrell mentioned, is a “vehicle” to express a “material appearance” and is very natural in our human development. This is also relevant to Emerson’s statement: “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” I would argue that Emerson’s use of “spirit” and “spiritual” to describe language would best be understood if, as a linguist might, as an abstract or emotional thought and the “natural” word use could refer to something concrete – hence: “enraged man” (anger) would refer to the spirit (i.e., the emotions or the abstract one cannot touch) and “lion” (symbolic meaning through visual evidence) would refer to the natural world (i.e., the concrete evidence, not-abstract). And this further explains when Emerson writes that “Nature is the symbol of the spirit.”

But what does all this mean? Well, I believe Emerson has already touched on “the natural approach” where language is a “vehicle of messages” and Chomsky’s “abstract rules” but uses this to lend additional support to his final argument – that language is a social construct (i.e., Sociolinguistic competence). Emerson explains this social connection:

“The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity of truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost.”

Likewise, Walt Whitman in “Sea-Drift” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” both poems found in Leaves of Grass, utilizes personification to illustrate just how Nature can be a healing force during a man’s distressing period.

“Sea-Drift” describes one man meandering through nature, specifically on a beach, while he experiences anguish after having lost his brother. The narrator of the poem laments:

From your memories sad brother…
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves.

(Whitman, “Sea-Drift” 11, 17, 23-24 Web)

The man, in utter sadness, falls to the beach in tears, meeting the ocean’s pulse of time and gradual consolation in the process. The narrator then correlates a childhood memory of two birds, one male and one female, to his own loss of his brother. The memory portrays a she-bird vanishing, “nor ever appear’d again,” (53) and the he-bird calling on his mate in dire hopes of her return and “pour’d forth the meanings which [the narrator] of all men know” (68) through his own loss and pain (Whitman, “Sea-Drift” Web). The poem ends with the narrator understanding the he-bird’s loss and desperate calling to its mate, much as he does to his dead brother: “Listen’d to keep, to sing, now translating the notes, / Following you my brother” (Whitman, “Sea-Drift” 79-80 Web). Nature ultimately, and finally, acts as a cathartic force, driving the mourner from reflective memories and closer to healing and understanding of the normalcy of loss and death. The narrator continues to exemplify this mood of healing and understanding:

Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
O madly the sea pushes upon the land,
With love, with love. (Whitman, “Sea-Drift” 81-84, 87-88 Web)

The narrator’s own love cannot soothe from within, but it is an external force which creates the healing power to begin. Nature illustrates to the man that time does not cease, in any form, because of death, but instead life rages forward, through the pain, offering tough love to those left alive to suffer the death of loved ones.

Whitman continues the theme of Nature’s therapeutic mending, illustrated with the ceaseless waves of continual healing. In “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” Whitman chooses to follow the flow of life, which he writes: “Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)” despite the tragedy confronting him, and further exclaims his own unification with Nature, “I ebb’d with the ocean of life” (Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” 62, 1 Web). Death, therefore, becomes a cycle and not an ultimate end to life. The narrator continues:

As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift

(Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” 22-25 Web).

Transcendence emerges from the earlier poem, “Sea-Drift,” and it is one of knowing that mankind and their woes are small matters compared to the endless cycles of nature and surrounding life, with the narrator claiming “I too am but a trail of drift and debris” and further illustrated by the narrator’s attempt to comprehend the universal and infinite: “I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single / object, and that no man ever can” (Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” 53, 38-39 Web). By the end of the poem, the narrator furnishes a higher understanding of Nature’s existence, one that is not completely cruel but rather sincere, offering its “sobbing,” and that mankind is indeed at the mercy of such Nature by reporting “We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out / before you” (Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” 81, 83-84 Web).

Both poems, in sum, exhibit one man’s anguish from having been confronted with death and to understand, as a survivor, that life and death do continue onward, and illustrated through Nature’s oceanic waves. Furthermore, Whitman offers a personal view of how Nature can be a comforter as well as an illustrator to how life continues, ebbs, and willfully knows that death is only one part of the dramatic whole of life.

As expert poets Emerson and Whitman must have known that language is derived from mankind’s attempt to decode nature into meaningful messages, and it is Nature, our supreme social context – so to speak – provides all the important messages we need to live a correct way of life; however, when we lose such connections to the natural world, mankind becomes lost to the path which is correspondent to harmony and peace.

References

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.”

Richards, Jack C. & Theodore S. Rodgers. (1986). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.

Whitman, Walt (1819-1892). “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (1891-1892). Whitmanarchive.org. Walt Whitman Archive, Eds. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, n.d. Web 2 March 2011.

—. “Sea-Drift” (1891-1892). Bibliomania.com. Bibliomania. n.d. Web 2 March 2011.

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Richard Blanco Says
~ A Poem of Redaction ~

Writing a poem
All our lives,
Central to obsession…

Leaving home
To love a country
As if you’ve lost one;
It is where you choose to die
That is your country.

Human drive to find
The perfect home,
Myths in literature
Of Utopia, the perfect place:
Avalon, Shangri-La, the Promised Land.

Home is a slippery word
Like a cake decoration.
Should be nothing here
I don’t remember.

Only the waves keeping time
To their life in Cuba;
To pretend, to pretend
That nothing I’ve lost
Is Lost.

I was home all along,
Ready to read this poem;
That this is our story.
We each add a chapter
Still being written
About our country.

Speak silently to my heart:
Here is your country;
This is your story;
Here your home;
Our ground;
Our sky.

One deep breath,
Then another.

This is for all of us
Like rainbows begging for praise
For us today.

The doors we open for each
Other all day
Without prejudice,
Tired from work,
Giving thanks for love
That loves you back,
But couldn’t give you
What you wanted:
Always home;
Always one moon
Of one country,
Facing the stars of hope,
Of one constellation
Waiting for us, together
To come and sit at the table.

Why can’t we have poets
On billboards in America?
Why God?

But really…
We all think the same thing,
But no one says:
Will mother come to visit us?

But God, listen to this:
I will keep counting
Until I’m somebody
And then I will say,
I forgive you.

I want the poem to be a mirror,
Transforming the personal
Into Art, using the personal
To reach the universal.

Whatever the Art demands
I have to do:
To be grand,
But not grandiose—
Those scars of exile,
Being in exile of exile.

***

This poem is a redaction from a Reading and Speaking Session Richard Blanco gave at City University of Hong Kong on July 21, 2014.

***

6:30 – 8:30 p.m., July 21, 2014 (Monday)
M3090, Level 3, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, City University of Hong Kong

Distinguished visiting writer Richard Blanco
will give a reading and speak in conversation with writer-in-residence Xu Xi

Reception & book signing follows

CityU 30th anniversary Year of Global Literary Expression event

Richard Blanco’s books will be sold at the event by Paddyfield

Richard Blanco ( http://richard-blanco.com/ ) was “made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, imported to the U.S.” He served as the fifth inaugural poet of the United States for President Obama’s second inauguration in 2012, at which he read the poem “One Today.” Blanco was the first Latino, immigrant and gay writer, as well as the youngest, accorded this honor. His books of poetry are Looking for the Gulf Motel (2012), Directions to the Beach of the Dead (2005) and City of a Hundred Fires (1998) which received the prestigious Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, and which one critic calls “the most exciting first book of the decade – vibrant and diverse, infused with energy and formal dexterity, equally at ease in Spanish and English.” Recent works include Boston Strong (2013), a commemorative chapbook that reproduces his poignant poem presented at the Boston Strong Concert, following the tragic events in April that year at the Boston Marathon. His most recent book is nonfiction, For All of Us, One Today (2013), which describes his journey as the inaugural poet. Blanco holds a MFA from Florida International University, and has taught at Central Connecticut University as well as several other universities. He was named a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow at Maclester College which awarded him an honorary doctorate. Blanco is also an engineer who has designed several town revitalization projects.

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Why I Write by George Orwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Why I Write (2004) by George Orwell (1903-1950) is actually a collection of four short essays: “Why I Write” (1946); “The Lion and the Unicorn” (1940); “A Hanging” (1931); and “Politics of the English Language” (1946). The collection amounts to 120 pages and can be read in an afternoon or over four evenings. The title, however, is a bit deceptive and consists of very little of why Orwell writes, but one can directly gleam that from his extended discourse on Socialism that he writes for political motives.

The first section of the book is “Why I Write” and it’s only 10 pages long, but one can get a deeper insight into Orwell’s history as a writer.

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six,” writes Orwell, “I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books… I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life” (p 1).

Most writers can relate to childhood stories. When I was a small child, I would sit in my mother’s lap as my father drove us across the long, empty Texas landscapes and listen to her make up such wonderful stories that included talking telephone poles and a purple polka-dotted elephant that could move at the speed of light and zip from tree to tree.

I honestly believe I saw that nameless elephant at least three times in my life. Twice was when I was a child and once when I told the same story to my daughter.

And most writers can also relate to feeling undervalued and the lonely hours of isolation that comes so naturally to a writer. When I was in Grade 5, I was placed in isolation for fighting (okay, I had a thing for boxing and Rocky films). To be frank, much of this isolation over that year developed my desire for autonomous academic work that I still carry on today.

Back then the isolation room was my principal’s supply closet next to the secretary. I would do the entire day’s work in two or three hours, do some reading (I read Hatchet by Gary Paulsen and loved it), take a small nap before lunch, have my lunch served to me, and then continue reading until I had to go home in the afternoon, and never once did I have to bother with the anxieties and frustrations that go along with school life.

I enjoyed this time to myself and it felt less like punishment and more like a reward. This is probably why I got into so many fights as a boy. But one day the secretary forgot to bring me lunch. It was a Friday and the school always served hamburgers for lunch and I was so looking forward to it. Around two o’clock the secretary came in and was upset that she forgot. None so more than I, one might argue. She pleaded to allow me to have her go to McDonald’s and bring me a Happy Meal. I’m a stubborn man at times and even then as a young boy I refused. After all, it was the principle of the issue. She should never have forgotten. But at times now that I am in my mid-thirties I sit alone, reading and writing, enjoying myself, and still feel that cold realization creep down my spine and think that someone has forgotten me yet again.

And like Orwell, I discovered the pleasure of reading Paradise Lost, although I did not do it until my early years in college.

“When I was about sixteen,” writes Orwell, “I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e., the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost,

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee

“Which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling of ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure” (p 3).

If one has never read either Paradise Lost (1667) or Paradise Regained (1671), I highly recommend doing so. Both by John Milton are such a pleasure to the mind and ear.

at City University of Hong Kong

One can sense the sheer joy words must have given Orwell when he describes his history with reading and writing, and it makes this reader all the more glad that such poetry can live in the hearts of men and women.

By the end of the essay Orwell gives his four major reasons (pgs 4-5) as to why he writes, and he explains that these reasons are also shared by most other writers:

1) Sheer Egoism
2) Aesthetic Enthusiasm
3) Historical Impulse
4) Political Purpose

I will leave you to agree or disagree with Orwell’s assessment to the motivations of writers, but I do tend to agree with most of his comments on the subject. Moving on.

“The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius” is 84 pages long and broken into three parts: Part I: England Your England; and Part II: Shopkeepers at War; and, Part III: The English Revolution. I do not share the taste for political discourse as Orwell does, but if you are interested in Socialism and the shaping of English politics and also Economic Inequality (which is a hot topic in the United States these days) then by all means take the time and read this essay. Orwell is very enlightening and I did enjoy his comments on how he would recommend reshaping an economy since he claims Capitalism has failed England. And to think that this essay was first published in 1940 and America is just now realizing the problems with Capitalism is impressive.

at City University of Hong Kong

“A Hanging” is approximately six pages long and is basically creative non-fiction, and involves Orwell’s account of witnessing an execution by hanging. I have read this piece in other formats over the course of ten years (this being the first time in print-book format) and the ending still haunts me as much as it did on the first reading. This short account of an execution inspired me to describe two important historical executions in the first and last chapters of my novel NO REVERENCE.

The last piece in the series is “Politics and the English Language” and is roughly 18 pages. As a writer this essay interested me the most and I continually pick up new tidbits of advice from Orwell upon each new reading. For example:

“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influences of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible” (p 102).

And Orwell explains how one can go about reversing the process of bastardizing the English language:
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

What am I trying to say?

What words will express it?

What image or idiom will make it clearer?

Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

“And he will probably ask himself two more:

Could I put it more shortly?

Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

“But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear” (p 113).

This last statement is referring to Orwell’s belief of how politicians use obfuscation in language to intentionally mislead audiences/voters or disguise true intent from the public.

Orwell adds to this argument:

“A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself” (p 114).

A man who does not think for himself is a dangerous man. He is dangerous in the same way a driver-less car is dangerous as it speeds down the highway directly toward a group of school children. Charlie Chaplin said it best in The Great Dictator (1940) –one of my favorite movies:

Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have a love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

(Entire speech in text and video are below)

Orwell concludes his ideas by arguing that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better” (p 116).

But this never-ending cycle of change in language is, regardless, fundamental and necessary for a society ever changing and evolving within itself.

Either way, Orwell makes some key points on what writers can do to improve not only their writing ability but also their speaking and thinking abilities as well.

For so many more reasons that I cannot even name here in this somewhat brief space, Why I Write is a very strong recommend.

Charlie Chaplin’s famous speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

“I’m sorry but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all.

“Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say “Do not despair.” The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have a love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

“Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it’s written “the kingdom of God is within man”, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power.

“Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill their promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

“Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”

CG hard at Play/Work/Play

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The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger is often mistaken—and rightly so—as a novel about an angry young man. When I was an angry young man—about the age of 20—I asked my English professor if I could sit in on her class since she was studying The Catcher in the Rye, and at that time I thought Holden Caulfield was an angry young man. Now, some fifteen years later, after having travelled across Asia and for the last ten years witnessing off and on extreme cases of poverty and grief, and after my second reading of the novel, I see a different side of Holden, and I also see a very tragic event that I had glanced over in my initial reading. Holden is not an angry young man. Holden is a grieving young man unable to cope with his brother’s death and much like Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury, we watch a sixteen-year-old Holden as he indirectly contemplates suicide over the course of a few days.

But before we get down into it, let’s take a moment to consider what most never even knew about Jerome David Salinger. Much like Holden who by the end of the novel has been kicked out of Pencey Prep and knows his father will send him to a military school, a young Salinger was shipped off to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne Pennsylvania, and one can know from Salinger’s own words that if this book were ever made into a movie, only Salinger could have played Holden.

 
We should also take into account that Salinger was drafted and in World War II he landed at Utah Beach during the Normandy Invasion. And all through the war, Salinger was working on this very novel and was even photographed doing so (see pic above). Salinger served from 1942 to 1944, and thereafter he suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized, much like our dear Holden. So it is by far safe to say that much of Holden’s life can be found in Salinger’s.

So for one thing, how do we know that Holden is hospitalized? The greatness of The Catcher in the Rye is partly due to its subtlety. Check out this passage and try to spot the clues:
Page 1: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Most people might believe that Holden is actually talking to them (i.e., the reader), but in the realms of the fictive dream which must at all times maintain literary soundness Holden can only be talking to someone within his own diegetic world. In other words, Holden is talking to a shrink and he is there laying on the couch as the novel opens and is uninterested in telling the psychoanalyst anything much about his early childhood. No, something else more tragic happened, and we are going to get to that later. But let’s continue with the opening page to spot more clues:

“In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all—I’m not saying that—but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that’s all I told D.B. about, and he’s my brother and all. He’s in Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe.”

What we do know about the rest of the story is that Holden’s home is in New York City, yet he clearly states on page one that “this crumby place” is near Hollywood, where his sole-surviving brother D.B. lives. And we also know that he is not at home, but he is somewhere that only allows visitors on the weekend and that he might be able to go home in a month or so. The only satisfying conclusion one can make is that Holden had a mental breakdown (e.g., “this madman stuff”) and he is now hospitalized somewhere in California and not in New York where the most of the plot takes place.
By the end of the novel, we return to more of these clues:

Times Square in Hong Kong, China

 
“That’s all I’m going to tell about. I could probably tell you what I did after I went home, and how I got sick and all, and what school I’m supposed to go to next fall, after I get out of here, but I don’t feel like it. I really don’t. That stuff doesn’t interest me too much right now.

“A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I’m going to apply myself when I go back to school next September. It’s such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it’s a stupid question…

“It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” (p 213-214).

Here Holden makes a direct mention to working with psychoanalysts and we can gather that each chapter could quite possibly be a single session as Holden tells the story that is centered around an incident that takes place at Pencey Prep.

The entire novel revolves around a young man’s suicide and Holden’s own conflict to kill himself. Much like Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, the reader follows a young man over the course of a few days as he contemplates life and death.

Quentin is a Harvard boy, much like Holden who comes from a similar community of prep schools and the Ivy League. Quentin and Holden have also gotten into many fights, coming home with a black eye, much like the one Holden wears after he gets into a fight with his roommate Stradlater—which prompts the hero Holden on his journey—and, later in the novel, with the pimp Maurice. Agonized and neurotic, Quentin desires to save his own sister Caddy (much in the same way Holden does Phoebe) and ultimately quits college (Holden again) and drowns himself in the Charles River.

But will Holden have a different outcome than Quentin?

Holden, however, does not kill himself and is ultimately committed to a mental institution. But suicide is the focal eye of this narrative tale, and it is often ignored in far too many intelligent conversations about The Catcher in the Rye. I argue that Holden is not angry at all the phonies. Not really. Instead, Holden is deeply troubled and saddened by the death of his brother Allie and the death of James Castle, a peer at Pencey Prep. Holden even confesses that he wants to kill himself:

“What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would’ve done it, too, if I’d been sure somebody’d cover me up as soon as I landed. I didn’t want a bunch of stupid rubbernecks looking at me when I was all gory” (p 104).

And Holden is not saying this metaphorically. No. He actually is considering killing himself by jumping out the hotel window. We know this because James Castle killed himself in the same manner at Pencey:

“And you should’ve seen him. He was a skinny little weak-looking guy, with wrists about as big as pencils. Finally, what he did, instead of taking back what he said, he jumped out the window. I was in the shower and all, and even I could hear him land outside. But I just thought something fell out the window, a radio or a desk or something, not a boy or anything. Then I heard everybody running through the corridor and down the stairs, so I put on my bathrobe and I ran downstairs too, and there was old James Castle laying right there on the stone steps and all. He was dead, and his teeth, and blood, were all over the place, and nobody would even go near him. He had on this turtleneck sweater I’d lent him. All they did with the guys that were in the room with him was expel them. They didn’t even go to jail” (p 170).

The Quentin Compson section (“June 2, 1910”) in The Sound and the Fury is by far one of my most favorite sections of any novel. There is an elegant dance Faulkner performs as the reader follows Quentin’s thoughts and progress as he struggles with the Past and Present, much like Holden does, throughout a single day (Holden’s time lasts roughly two days).

Holden is traumatized by death, much like Salinger was during World War II, and it is this young man who cannot come to terms with his own mortality, especially after a loss of a loved one, his brother Allie. On the very next page from the description of James Castle’s death, Holden has a conversation about Allie with his sister Phoebe:

“I like Allie,” I said. “And I like doing what I’m doing right now. Sitting here with you, and talking, and thinking about stuff, and—”

“Allie’s dead—You always say that! If somebody’s dead and everything, and in Heaven, then it isn’t really—”

“I know he’s dead! Don’t you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can’t I? Just because somebody’s dead, you don’t just stop liking them, for God’s sake—especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that’re alive and all” (p 171).

Holden is not so much an angry young man as he is a grieving young man, and he so desperately needs someone to talk to. Phoebe, his kid sister, however, is not helping. She even mentions death to Holden later in the same conversation:

“Daddy’s going to kill you. He’s going to kill you,” she said.

I wasn’t listening, though. I was thinking about something else—something crazy. “You know what I’d like to be?” I said. You know what I’d like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?”

“What? Stop swearing.”

“You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d like—”

“It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said. “It’s a poem. By Robert Burns.”

“I know it’s a poem by Robert Burns.”

She was right, though. It is “If a body meet a body coming through the rye.” I didn’t know it then, though.

“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,’” I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

Old Phoebe didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, when she said something, all she said was, “Daddy’s going to kill you” (p 172-173).

Holden can find no comfort with his sister and when he seeks out someone else to talk to, Holden calls Mr. Antolini, the very teacher who is there at James Castle’s death.

“He was about the best teacher I ever had, Mr. Antolini. He was a pretty young guy, not much older than my brother D.B., and you could kid around with him without losing your respect for him. He was the one that finally picked up that boy that jumped out the window I told you about, James Castle. Old Mr. Antolini felt his pulse and all, and then he took off his coat and put it over James Castle and carried him all the way over to the infirmary. He didn’t even give a damn if his coat got all bloody” (p 174).

What tragedy. Imagine, as I can, that this happened: that that moment described above of a teacher having to use his coat to carry away a young boy who has just killed himself was real and you were the teacher or you were one of the students standing around the smashed and broken body of the boy. Oh, how we do not truly cherish life until it is too late! What heartache and agony must it have been for both Mr. Antolini and Holden! To witness such a death is almost incomprehensible. James Castle had so much potential before him, and yet he felt like whatever troubled him could only be solved through suicide. And Holden, like James Castle—the very boy Holden lent a turtleneck sweater too—is considering suicide. But Mr. Antolini has some words of wisdom for Holden, and this might have saved the young man’s life:

Mr. Antolini lit another cigarette. He smoked like a fiend. Then he said, “Frankly, I don’t know what the hell to say to you, Holden.”

“I know. I’m very hard to talk to. I realize that.”

“I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don’t honestly, know what kind…Are you listening to me?”

[and a little later in the conversation…]

He started concentrating again. Then he said, “This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started. You follow me?”

[and a little later…]

“I don’t want to scare you,” he said, “but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause.” He gave me a funny look. “If I write something down for you, will you read it carefully? And keep it?”

[Mr. Antolini has just directly referenced Holden’s conflict of suicide by saying “dying nobly, one way or another,” and a little later adds…]

Then he came back and sat down with the paper in his hand. “Oddly enough, this wasn’t written by a practicing poet. It was written by a psychoanalyst named Wilhem Stekel. Here’s what he—Are you still with me?”

“Yes, sure I am.”

“Here’s what he said: ‘The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

[and finally,]

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry” (p 186-189).

And it is poetry. This last statement best sums up the overall theme, in my mind, found in The Catcher in the Rye. Humanity is about sharing knowledge and that “beautiful reciprocal arrangement” is indeed “poetry,” much like this book.

Most people, however, will focus on the somewhat homosexual encounter between Mr. Antolini and Holden and completely miss that Mr. Antolini, quite possibly, has just saved Holden’s life. But let us consider another possible interpretation of events besides a homosexual one.

Holden describes the incident between him and Mr. Antolini:

“Then something happened. I don’t even like to talk about it.

“I woke up all of a sudden. I don’t know what time it was or anything, but I woke up. I felt something on my head, some guy’s hand. Boy, it really scared hell out of me. What it was, it was Mr. Antolini’s hand.

“What he was doing, he was sitting on the floor right next to the couch, in the dark and all, and he was sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head. Boy, I’ll bet I jumped about a thousand feet” (p 191-192).

Here, Holden takes Mr. Antolini’s act as a homosexual one. This may have been Mr. Antolini’s intentions, or it may not have been. Imagine that like Holden Mr. Antolini is also suffering from the death of James Castle and Mr. Antolini has recognized that Holden is in a similar predicament. Holden, a youth with such promise ahead of him, is considering taking the easy way out. And remember that Mr. Antolini has been up drinking highballs all night and perhaps he was just sitting there adoring the immortality and beauty found in youth’s promise, the innocence un-abandoned. Perhaps Mr. Antolini feared for Holden’s life and was sitting, indeed drunk, by the couch and thinking not of sex as some deviants might argue, but he was sitting and thinking of that dead boy he had to carry beneath his own coat to the school’s infirmary. What sadness!

And even Holden says he might have misunderstood Mr. Antolini’s actions:

“I mean I started thinking that even if he was a flit he certainly’d been very nice to me. I thought how he hadn’t minded it when I’d called him up so late, and how he’d told me to come right over if I felt like it. And how he went to all that trouble giving me that advice about finding out the size of your mind and all, and how he was the only guy that’d even gone near that boy James Castle I told you about when he was dead. I thought about all that stuff. And the more I thought about it, the more depressed I got. I mean I started thinking maybe I should’ve gone back to his house. Maybe he was only patting my head just for the hell of it. The more I thought about it, though, the more depressed and screwed up about it I got” (p 195).

Holden is wounded emotionally, and he even admits to such:

“When I was really drunk, I started that stupid business with the bullet in my guts again. I was the only guy at the bar with a bullet in their guts. I kept pulling my hand under my jacket, on my stomach and all, to keep the blood from dripping all over the place. I didn’t want anybody to know I was even wounded. I was concealing the fact that I was a wounded sonuvabitch” (p 150).

And Holden’s “wound in the stomach” is not by accident but a direct reference to the emotional pain he is experiencing from another death, the death of his brother Allie.

“When the weather’s nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie’s grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I certainly don’t enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn’t too bad when the sun was out, but twice—twice—we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place” (p 155).

And this very rain appears once more at the end of the novel, in one of my favorite scenes in all of literature, Holden is at the zoo with Phoebe:
“Then what she did—it damn near killed me—she reached in my coat pocket and took out my red hunting hat and put it on my head…

“She ran and bought her ticket and got back on the goddam carrousel just in time. Then she walked all the way around it till she got her own horse back. Then she got on it. She waved to me and I waved back.

“Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn’t get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn’t care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling. I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there” (p 212-213).

Indeed.

The Catcher in the Rye is not really about an angry young man. Not really. It’s about a young man who is unable to grieve for his brother Allie’s death and the death of James Castle snaps something inside Holden when he comes face to face with pure, raw death that no longer hides behind a veil, and it is very likely that very teacher, Mr. Antolini, who picks up the shattered and bloody body of James Castle, that very teacher who reaches out and saves Holden from suicide, unlike Quentin Compson who is left unsaved and perishes beneath the anguish and turmoil that face every one of us in life.

So with that, there is really nothing left to do, except in the infamous words of Holden Caulfield:

“Maybe I’ll go to China. My sex life is lousy” (p 147).

Or if that doesn’t take your fancy, I recommend going out and purchasing a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and/or J.D. Salinger’s long awaited new novel due out in 2015.

Comin thro’ the Rye
BY ROBERT BURNS (1759–1796)

[First Setting]
Comin thro’ the rye, poor body,
Comin thro’ the rye,
She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie
Comin thro’ the rye.

[CHORUS.]
Oh Jenny ‘s a’ weet poor body
Jenny ‘s seldom dry,
She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie
Comin thro’ the rye.

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body —
Need a body cry.
Oh Jenny ‘s a’ weet, &c.

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the glen;
Gin a body kiss a body —
Need the warld ken!
Oh Jenny ‘s a’ weet, &c.

[Second Setting]
Gin a body meet a body, comin thro’ the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body, need a body cry;
Ilka body has a body, ne’er a ane hae I;
But a’ the lads they loe me, and what the waur am I.

Gin a body meet a body, comin frae the well,
Gin a body kiss a body, need a body tell;
Ilka body has a body, ne’er a ane hae I,
But a the lads they loe me, and what the waur am I.

Gin a body meet a body, comin frae the town,
Gin a body kiss a body, need a body gloom;
Ilka Jenny has her Jockey, ne’er a ane hae I,
But a’ the lads they loe me, and what the waur am I.

View all my reviews

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Alchemist (1988) by Paulo Coelho is a sad but beautiful story about a young shepherd who leaves Spain and goes to Egypt in search of his treasure buried, he believes, somewhere near the Pyramids. Instead, Santiago finds his Personal Legend. What is a Personal Legend, you might ask? In an introductory letter written in 2002, Paulo asks a similar question, one to which he is willing to answer:

“What is a personal calling? It is God’s blessing, it is the path that God chose for you here on Earth. Whenever we do something that fills us with enthusiasm, we are following our legend. However, we don’t all have the courage to confront our own dream” (viii).

And many will argue, so what? Paulo asks a similar question, because many people choose not to follow their childhood dreams:

“So, why is it important to live our personal calling if we are only going to suffer more than other people?

“Because, once we have overcome the defeats—and we always do—we are filled by a greater sense of euphoria and confidence. In the silence of our hearts, we know that we are proving ourselves worthy of the miracle of life. Each day, each hour, is part of the good fight. We start to live with enthusiasm and pleasure. Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our soul, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives” (ix).

The Alchemist in Wan Chai, Hong Kong

And what is far more interesting than this philosophy Paulo offers us in The Alchemist is how the book came to be.

In the section “About the Author” at the back of the book, we can find how truly special one’s personal calling can be and how it can help shape the world:

“He tried his hand at writing but didn’t start seriously until after he had had an encounter with a stranger. The man first came to him in a vision, and two months later Paulo met him at a café in Amsterdam. The stranger suggested that Paulo should return to Catholicism and study the benign side of magic. He also encouraged Paulo to walk the Road of Santiago de Compostela, the medieval pilgrim’s route.

“In 1987, a year after completing the pilgrimage, Paulo wrote The Pilgrimage: Diary of Magus. The book describes his experiences and his discovery that the extraordinary occurs in the lives of ordinary people. A year later, Paulo wrote a very different book, The Alchemist. The first edition sold only nine hundred copies and the publishing house decided not to reprint.

“Paulo would not surrender his dream. He found another publishing house, a bigger one. He wrote Brida (a work still unpublished in English) that received a lot of attention in the press, and both The Alchemist and The Pilgrimage appeared on bestseller lists. The Alchemist went on to sell more copies than any other book in Brazilian literary history” (194-195).

And despite how fickle this shows the publishing industry in any country to be and the simpleton’s greed that goes with such behavior, The Alchemist went on to become an international phenomenon due to one writer’s personal calling. Have faith, the Universe calls, in yourself.

And like Paulo, Santiago (so named from the pilgrimage and the historical figure) goes in search of his own Personal Legend.

One night as Santiago settles his flock in an abandoned church, he has a dream of the Pyramids and an ancient treasure buried there. Over time he contemplates giving up his sheep and heading to Africa, just two hours away by boat. And as we follow Santiago on his struggles to achieve his dream, we cannot but help to look into the pages of the book and see a reflection of our own lives (I know I did mine). And Paulo offers a bit of philosophy to meditate on while we join Santiago on his hero’s journey.

“When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person’s life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own” (16).

I know I have had people like this in my life. Have you?

And then one day as Santiago is reading he meets an old man who turns out to be the King of Salem and a sort of an oracle whose name is Melchizedek.

“It’s a book that says the same thing almost all the other books in the world say,” continued the old man. “It describes people’s inability to choose their own Personal Legends. And it ends up saying that everyone believes the world’s greatest lie.”

“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised.

“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie” (18).

Since I turned 25, and looked ahead to the next quarter of a century before me, I promised I would make the most of these precious years. I left my comfortable job at Capital One Bank, two years before the market crashed—which we all knew was going to happen before the public did, and this is another reason why I am glad I left—I left America and came to Southeast Asia in search of my own Personal Legend. And I have never regretted it since.

But every day I see people like the ones the old man is talking about. Those people so blinded by conformity that they have forgotten how to choose their own Personal Legends, and they writhe in agony each day, unknowing that each present day is the sum of all their choices made in the past. Do you know people like this? Do you know what your Personal Legend is? Are you on the path to finding it?

And like Santiago, you might not know what a Personal Legend is supposed to be.

“The boy didn’t know what a person’s ‘Personal Legend’ was.

“It’s what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is.

“At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their Personal Legend” (21).

When I first learned to read—I remember well—I sat in the classroom over my basic reader companion and found that dead men could speak to me through words, language. And it was at that very moment the Universe opened up to me and I told myself that I wanted to become a writer, a published author, so that I too could share the knowledge that would come to me as I grew. And as I grew more and more things and people in life tried to convince me that my dreams were foolish and impractical and selfish. And yet, the more I follow the Universe which guides me to my own Personal Legend, the more I am rewarded, both financially and spiritually. I cannot explain it. It just is.

“In order to find the treasure, you will have to follow the omens. God has prepared a path for everyone to follow. You just have to read the omens that he left for you” (29).

And Santiago, our young hero we cheer onward, follows such omens. He sells his sheep, leaves Andalusia, and makes his way to Tangier, where he is robbed by the first kind man he meets. Broke and alone, Santiago spends the night on the empty streets.

“That morning he had known everything was going to happen to him as he walked through the familiar fields. But now, as the sun began to set, he was in a different country, a stranger in a strange land, where he couldn’t even speak the language. He was no longer a shepherd, and he had nothing, not even the money to return and start everything over” (38-39).

But Santiago keeps the faith and follows the omens which lead to a hill and a merchant who sells crystals. A year passes away while the boy works for the merchant and both prosper. The boy, however, does not give up on his dream of going to the Pyramids.

One day Santiago discovers that the merchant once had a dream, and that dream was to make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

“The old man continued, ‘You have been a real blessing to me. Today, I understand something I didn’t see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.”

Many people I have met are like the merchant. They would rather continue to dream their dreams than to have their dreams become real and tangible. Perhaps it is because of fear. Perhaps it is because of wanting to remain comfortable. Are you like the merchant or are you like Santiago?

Nevertheless, Santiago joins a caravan to cross the mighty Sahara, never giving up on his vision and his Personal Legend which is leading him to the Pyramids.

And Santiago keeps learning along the way. He was learning “that there was a language in the world that everyone understood, a language [he] had used throughout the time that he was trying to improve things at the shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired” (62).

I am an over-achiever, and most people who know me know this is true. But what they don’t know is why I do what I do. Most people who know me don’t really know me at all and they make false assumptions about me. They think I am an over-achiever because I am a pretentious ass or someone who thinks he is far better than others. In short, they think I am arrogant and filled with hubris. And I look at them with tired eyes as old as the Universe and remain quiet.

I am an over-achiever, and most people who know me know this is true. But what they don’t know is that I am an over-achiever because I am filled with enthusiasm for life and knowledge. I am filled with love and purpose. I am on a personal journey for something I believe in and I alone desire. And more often than not this confounds people, confuses them, frightens them, and bewilders them into a state of negativity that even they cannot explain, let alone comprehend. But the reason most people are this way is because long ago they gave up on their own Personal Legend and chose to ignore their one true calling. And this, too, is why I remain silent and suffer when people think ill of me. For they have a fate far worse than I.

Because ‘when you want something, all the universe conspires to help you achieve it’ (62) and ‘the closer one gets to realizing his Personal Legend, the more that Personal Legend becomes his true reason for being’ (72).

And as Santiago sits atop a camel crossing the grand desert of northern Africa he recalls his mother and what she had once said about omens.

“‘Hunches,’ his mother used to call them. The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden 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” (74).
Are you someone who listens to intuition or do you choose to ignore it?

Along the way, if we are lucky and blessed, we meet people who help us to listen closer to our own intuition, like how a camel driver is able to teach young Santiago.

“The land was ruined, and I had to find some other way to earn a living. So now I’m a camel driver. But that disaster taught me to understand the word of Allah: people need not fear the unknown if they are capable of achieving what they need and want.

“We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it’s our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand” (76).

And later the camel driver adds,

“Because I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man… Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living right now” (85).

And he is right. Living each moment fully—what many business leaders and educators are now calling ‘mindfulness’—is a step toward happiness. Most should be so fortunate. So how about you? Are you living in the past, present or future? Is life a grand festival for you?

And then one day, after the caravan reaches an oasis, Santiago meets a young woman named Fatima.

“At that moment, it seemed to him that time stood still, and the Soul of the World surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke—the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes met, as had theirs here at the well. She smiled, and that was certainly an omen—the omen he had been awaiting, without even knowing he was, for all his life. The omen he had sought to find with his sheep and in his books, in the crystals and in the silence of the desert.

“It was the pure Language of the World. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time…

“Because, when you know that language, it’s easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it’s in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning.

“Maktub, thought the boy” (92-93).

And all my life I have believed in such a great love, one that is divided into ‘twin souls’ and only feels at peace when the two are made whole. Have you found your great love?

If so…

“You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love…the love that speaks the Language of the World” (120).

For the past two years I have struggled with a divorce and only when I read that ‘love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend’ did I finally understand why I was not happy and not in tune with the Universe. For you see, my ex-wife, from the moment I met her, constantly made life difficult for me because she could not possibly imagine my Personal Legend and how important such a calling is to me and to the world. Not many people can understand another person’s Personal Legend, and that is exactly why it is not love, especially the true kind.

But we cannot be angry at such people who are blinded by their own misgivings and failures. They have given up on their own Personal Legend long ago and they simply want to drag you down with them. Don’t let them. By any means necessary, follow your heart and see it to the end. Much like the young Santiago, who constantly gains and loses only to find himself getting closer to achieving his dream (and in this story it is both a figurative and a literal dream that he seeks to accomplish).

And much like Santiago, with each passing day I find my dreams becoming reality. But this, too, comes at a great cost. Most people are not willing to pay such high prices nor make such costly sacrifices. And why is that?

“People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.”

“My heart is afraid that it will suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

“Every second of the search is an encounter with God,” the boy told his heart. “When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous, because I’ve known that every hour was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I’ve discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve…”

“Why don’t people’s hearts tell them to continue to follow their dreams?” the boy asked the alchemist.

“Because that’s what makes a heart suffer most, and hearts don’t like to suffer” (130-131).

And as the alchemist and Santiago head away from the oasis and towards the Pyramids, they encounter a small band of devious men. They ask the alchemist what the stone and the liquid are. The alchemist tells them it is the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. They laugh and leave the sacred possessions behind.

“Are you crazy?” the boy asked the alchemist, when they had moved on. “What did you do that for?”

“To show you one of life’s simple lessons,” the alchemist answered. “When you possess great treasures within you, and try to tell others of them, seldom are you believed” (134).

This is certainly one lesson I learned long ago. When I was just starting to listen to my intuition and before I had begun to follow my Personal Legend to Asia, I told my sister about those ‘treasures within’. She didn’t believe me then, and I doubt she even cares today.

But imagine and consider: if your own sister or brother or parents or spouse or lover choose not to believe in you, then how much more difficult will it be for strangers?

But regardless, our young hero continues on alone and unafraid to the Pyramids, where he comes upon them late at night.

“The boy fell to his knees and wept. He thanked God for making him believe in his Personal Legend, and for leading him to meet a king, a merchant, and Englishman, and an alchemist. And above all for his having met a woman of the desert who had told him that love would never keep a man from his Personal Legend…

“But here he was, at the point of finding his treasure, and he reminded himself that no project is completed until its objective has been achieved” (160-161).

I would so much like to tell you that Santiago came to the end of his Personal Legend, as did I, and that he found his buried treasure, as I have.

But I can’t. You will just have to wait and read the book.

As for me, I am also still waiting. But now I know I am not alone.

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Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Eleven Minutes (2003) by Paulo Coelho is much more than a story about a prostitute trying to find love. From the interior of Brazil to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro to Geneva, Switzerland Maria goes in search for her dreams without losing the best parts of her soul or her faith. Some might argue that the book is about good and evil and that internal-everlasting struggle inside each one of us. Another might disagree and say that the true essence of Maria’s plight can be found between innocence and experience. A few might further claim that Paulo takes the reader into a dark and seedy underworld to explore the workings of international exploitation and sex trafficking. Whatever the story’s true intent, it all begins as a fairy tale:

“Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. ‘Once upon a time’ is how all the best children’s stories begin and ‘prostitute’ is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let’s keep that beginning.

“Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria” (1).

And it is no coincidence that Maria is named after the Holy Mother, Mary, to whom Maria often prays to for protection and guidance. But Paulo throughout his clever narrative keeps the reader inside a fairy tale meant for adults, because we all know that we do straddle between the hope and dreams within or the dark abyss that tempts us from without.

As Maria’s first love as a child moves away, she finds there is pain and loss in loving someone so deeply, even as we often do as children.

“At that moment, Maria learned that certain things are lost forever. She learned too that there was a place called ‘somewhere far away,’ that the world was vast and her own town very small, and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave…

“It began to seem to Maria that the world was too large, that love was something very dangerous and that the Virgin was a saint who inhabited a distant heaven and didn’t listen to the prayers of children” (4-5).

Little by little we begin to recognize that ‘somewhere far away’ doesn’t have to be some foreign land but it can also be someplace far from the person we thought we one would day grow up to be, and perhaps that is why most people stop praying or believing in the good things life has to offer. Some stop praying and believing because they think heaven doesn’t hear ‘the prayers of children.’ And with such violence and mayhem and absurdity in the world, these broken people just might have a point.

But Maria decides she will not be broken. She knows exactly what she wants. She wants to go far, far away and find her prince charming that will rescue her and give her all her heart’s desire: true love. For some prostitutes that is all they ever really want.

Paulo, throughout his third person narrative, adds Maria’s own first person voice in bits of diary excerpts at the end of some chapters, making this book—much like the Holy Bible—a kind of epistolary novel.

“If I’m looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre loves out of my system. The little experience of life I’ve had has taught me that no one owns anything, that everything is an illusion—and that applies to material as well as spiritual things. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever (as happened often enough to me already) finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.

“And if nothing belongs to me, then there’s no point wasting my time looking after things that aren’t mine; it’s best to live as if today were the first (or last) day of my life” (26).

And there on the beach in Rio Maria decides to take a chance and leave Brazil with a strange man who says he can make her a star. But first she introduces Roger to her mother and her mother responds as often as Asian women do:

“My dear, it’s better to be unhappy with a rich man than happy with a poor man, and over there you’ll have far more chance of becoming an unhappy rich woman. Besides, if it doesn’t work out, you can just get on the bus and come home” (32).

But Maria wants more than that and she doesn’t stop or quit even when her dream becomes a nightmare. When Roger begins to try and exploit her over in Switzerland as a Samba dancer, she breaks free from that small hell. Maria grows and becomes aware of an inner power she possesses, knowing that people have power over you only when you give them that power and she recalls a book (The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho perhaps?) she had read before:

“In Brazil she had read a book about a shepherd who, in searching for his treasure, encounters various difficulties, and these difficulties help him to get what he wants; she was in exactly the same position. She was aware now that the reason she had been dismissed was so that she could find her true destiny, as a model” (45).

However the dream of working as a model—which in all honesty, most modelling agencies act in part as assistants for wealthy men to have access to extremely beautiful but desperate women—quickly takes a turn when an Arab offers her 1,000 francs for sex. Now jobless and seeing the truth behind the “modelling agency” Maria takes the money believing there would be more opportunities to score such extravagant wages.

But at the table with the Arab she cries. She asks him to pour some more wine and to let her cry, and she thinks:

“And Maria thought about the little boy who had asked to borrow a pencil, about the young man who had kissed her and how she had kept her mouth closed, about her excitement at seeing Rio for the first time, about the men who had used her and given nothing back, about the passions and loves lost along the way. Despite her apparent freedom, her life consisted of endless hours spent waiting for a miracle, for true love, for an adventure with the same romantic ending she had seen in films and read about in books. A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone’s mind is love. What nonsense! The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin… Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly” (53).

And the reader soon finds herself unable to judge this prostitute because, in fact, Maria is like each and every one of us out there in the world today faced with failures and despair along the road to our great success, much like that little shepherd boy in The Alchemist who constantly is losing his most valuable possessions in search of finding his great treasure. But at the end of the road, great fame and fortune, or not, we hope we are indeed lucky enough to find that greatest reward of them all: a life filled with true love.

And through her despair, Maria becomes empowered, learning her sex trade, her body and, above all, how to please her clients. And she learns why a man would pay for a woman in the first place:

“I have discovered the reason why a man pays for a woman: he wants to be happy.

“He wouldn’t pay a thousand francs just to have an orgasm. He wants to be happy. I do too, everyone does, and no one is…what have I got to lose if I decide to become a prostitute for a while?

“Honor. Dignity. Self-respect. Although, when I think about it, I’ve never had any of those things.
I didn’t ask to be born, I’ve never found anyone to love me, I’ve always made the wrong decisions—now I’m letting life decide for me” (62).

And isn’t that what most people do: allow life to decide for them?

Maria, in her lonely turmoil, reflects:

“They all dream of someone who will come along and see in them a real woman—companion, lover, friend. But they all know, from the very first moment of each new encounter, that this simply isn’t going to happen.

“I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write and write about love—otherwise my soul won’t survive” (74).

And each day I see it just as Maria is faced with it in her story. And what is it exactly? It is a person sitting next to you with death already on their face and death already in their soul. It is a woman who has given up all hope of finding true love and allows life and, worst of all, others to decide for her, and in the end she takes her own life out of extreme despair. It is a child who grows up not believing in the power of prayer and dreams. It is the face of an innocent babe who strives for one thing and one thing only: love. Without it, the baby would die, and most often do before they are ever born.

And if we assume prostitutes are simply whores without a soul, well we might be wrong.

“Most prostitutes had some kind of religious faith, and attended their respective churches and masses, said their prayers and had encounters with God” (80).

What is interesting to see develop with this story is Maria’s profession mixing with her faith. Religion and prostitution were once closely connected and sacred, and once some special women were considered Divine Consorts and these were married to the gods.

From James Frazer’s The Golden Bough:

“In Cyprus [among many other lands and nations] it appears that before marriage all women were formerly obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the sanctuary of the goddess, whether she went by the name Aphrodite, Astarte, or what not. Similar customs prevailed in many parts of Western Asia. Whatever its motive, the practice was clearly regarded, not as an orgy of lust, but as a solemn religious duty performed in the service of that great Mother Goddess of Western Asia whose name varied, while her type remained constant, from place to place” (398).

“In Phoenician temples women prostituted themselves for hire in the service of religion, believing that by this conduct they propitiated the goddess and won her favor. ‘It was a law of the Amorites, that she who was about to marry should sit in fornication seven days by the gate’” (398-399).

And Paulo, it seems as well, does his own research on the history of prostitution. A painter, one of Maria’s ‘special clients’ named Ralph Hart, explains to her the origins of her profession:

“The profession started to become organized in the sixth century B.C., when a Greek legislator, Solon, set up state-controlled brothels and began imposing taxes on ‘the skin trade.’ Athenian businessmen were pleased because what was once prohibited became legal. The prostitutes, on the other hand, started to be classified according to how much tax they paid.

“The cheapest were the pornai, slaves who belonged to the owners of the establishment.

Next came the peripatetica, who picked up her clients in the street.

Lastly, the most expensive and highest quality, was the hetaera, the female companion, who accompanied businessmen on their trips, dined in chic restaurants, controlled her own money, gave advice and meddled in the political life of the city. As you see, what happened then still happens now” (203).

And it does, on all three levels.

The one that no longer exists or is no longer openly practiced is sacred prostitution. “The Greek historian, Herodotus, wrote of Babylonia: ‘They have a strange custom here, by which every woman born in Sumeria is obliged, at least once in her lifetime, to go to the temple of the goddess Ishtar and give her body to a stranger, as a symbol of hospitality and for a symbolic price’” (204).

And Maria struggles with her choice: to continue with her profession and explore the darker side of her sexual interests or to choose her love, the artist. But she finds herself walking one afternoon and the consequences become very clear to her:

“And the reason was this: she didn’t want to go back.

“And the reason she didn’t want to go back wasn’t Ralf Hart, Switzerland or Adventure. The real reason couldn’t have been simpler: money.

“Money! A special piece of paper, decorated in somber colors, which everyone agreed was worth something—and she believed it, everyone believed it—until you took a pile of that paper to a bank, a respectable, traditional, highly confidential Swiss bank and asked: ‘Could I buy back a few hours of my life?’ ‘No, madam, we don’t sell, we only buy…’

“She looked around her. People were walking along, heads down, hurrying off to work, to school, to the employment agency, to Rue de Berne, telling themselves: ‘I can wait a little longer. I have a dream, but there’s no need to realize it today, besides, I need to earn some money.’ Of course, everyone spoke ill of her profession, but, basically, it was all a question of selling her time, like everyone else. Doing things she didn’t want to do, like everyone else. Putting up with horrible people, like everyone else. Handing over her precious body and her precious soul in the name of a future that never arrived, like everyone else. Saying that she still didn’t have enough, like everyone else. Waiting just a little bit longer, like everyone else. Waiting so that she could earn just a little bit more, postponing the realization of her dreams; she was too busy right now, she had a great opportunity ahead of her, loyal clients who were waiting for her, who could pay between three hundred and fifty and one thousand francs a session” (224-225).

And how often have you acted like everyone else?

How often have you postponed the realization of your dreams because you now believe prayers go unanswered, childhood dreams go unfulfilled?

How often have you secretly despised those who passionately chased after their dreams and quietly whispered failure for those brave souls?

How often have you truly been happy about your place in this world, in this life?

We all have choices to make, and that is how we are defined by this world, by this life.

And I almost forgot. What does “Eleven Minutes” even mean?

The title, Eleven Minutes, gets its name from what Maria is told on her first night working as a prostitute in the night club, Copacabana:

“For a night? Now come on, Maria, you’re exaggerating. It’s really only forty-five minutes, and if you allow time for taking off clothes, making some phony gesture of affection, having a bit of banal conversation and getting dressed again, the amount of time spent actually having sex is about eleven minutes.”

“Eleven minutes. The world revolved around something that only took eleven minutes” (86).

[And that is about as long as it took for you to read this review.]

But even Maria disagrees with the eleven-minute theory. “She thinks about the other prostitutes who work with her. She thinks about her mother and her friends. They all believe that man feels desire for only eleven minutes a day, and that they’ll pay a fortune for it. That’s not true; a man is also a woman; he wants to find someone, to give meaning to his life” (209).

And even though it would be nice for a prostitute like Maria to find her true love and heart’s content, all we ever really know is that each of us wants to find that special someone to make all the pain disappear, to have all the laughter finally make sense, to have time stand frozen between the two of you and watch at the same time how the world continues to speed by, and to ultimately know that life does have a sacred meaning for you and for everyone else.

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Aleph by Paulo Coelho

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Aleph (2011) by Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist (1988), astounds his readers with a story that balances nonfiction with fiction, claimed as an autobiographical account presented in the form of a novel. And quite so as a reader begins to ask how much is truth and how much is fiction as a married Paulo (then 59 in 2006) takes on a twenty-one-year-old star violinist named Hilal from Russia as his travelling companion on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok, a total of 9,288 kilometers. But what is far more interesting than his moments with a young seductress who seems to have a mysterious purpose for his present life (and past life as a priest during the Inquisition) is that Paulo believes he has even more to offer, that despite his success he seeks to grow as an individual and writer; even after all he has done he believes he can do more—and that is truly inspirational.

After all his success and millions of dollars from selling his stories, the book opens with Paulo at his home in the French Pyrenees very depressed and devoid of any progression, either spiritual or professional, in his life.

The French Pyrenees

He is stuck in his daily routines and he feels he is unable to grow as he believes he should. What follows, which is most of the novel (autobiography?) reads like a confessional, of a man being completely open and honest with his readers:

“My life has changed a lot since the far-off year of 1986, when my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela brought me face to face with my destiny, or ‘God’s plan’…Since then, I have done everything that my work demanded of me. After all, it was my choice and my blessing. I started travelling like a mad thing. The great lessons I learned had been precisely those that my journeys had taught me.

“Well, the truth is, I’ve always travelled like a mad thing ever since I was young. Recently, though, I seem to be spending my life in airports and hotels, and any sense of adventure has rapidly given way to profound tedium. When I complained that I never stayed in one place for very long, people were horrified: ‘But it’s great to travel. I wish I had the money to do what you’re doing!’

“Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage…After weeks on the road, listening to a language you don’t understand, using a currency whose value you don’t comprehend, walking down streets you’ve never walked down before, you discover that your old ‘I’, along with everything you ever learned, is absolutely no use at all in the face of those new challenges, and you begin to realise that, buried deep in your unconscious mind, there is someone much more interesting and adventurous and more open to the world and to new experiences” (10-11).

Paulo’s confessional on travel is as accurate of one as any I have ever read. He is right on each account. When I first started travelling the world—first South Korea, then Guam, then Vietnam, Cambodia, Bali, and on and on—I began to see that my American heritage and cultural training meant absolutely nothing in the strange lands around me. I became the foreigner, the alien, and Paulo is right, you often find a much more interesting person waiting deep inside your unconscious mind.

So, to break Paulo’s mild depression—if I am allowed to call it that—he decided to take J.’s advice and head back out into the world to do some book signings and meet his faithful readers. And on this path, this deeply moving revelation of one man seeking to find happiness—eerily similar to what Robin Williams must have suffered before his passing—Paulo offers us some advice on life and death:

“They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence and out of that moment Heaven or Hell is born.

“Hell is when we look back during that fraction of a second and know that we wasted an opportunity to dignify the miracle of life. Paradise is being able to say at that moment: ‘I made some mistakes, but I wasn’t a coward. I lived my life and did what I had to do’” (21).

And by this point Paulo has his claws deep in his readers as they follow him on this spiritual quest to regain happiness. And most of these readers will argue that this is a book of truth, that the ‘I’ in the book is without question the ‘I’ that is the real Paulo Coelho. On that note the book becomes an interesting insight into one author’s daily life. A behind the scenes look, if you will.

Paulo tells the story of how he met his agent, Mônica. Paulo was not getting published, a regular guy just trying to push through the everyday struggles every writer has in order to get noticed and given a chance by a publishing company. But nothing was happening. That is until Mônica championed his cause.

She quit university, moved from Rio to Catalonia, and tried to sell the idea that there was this Brazilian writer who should be read by the entire world. After many months and still no progress—after all, we must grow, evolve if you will, in order for us to really be happy—Mônica continued to fight for Paulo. So much so, he flew to see her and did his best to convince her to give up, go back to Brazil, that she was wasting her life away. She refused. She saw something in that man’s work and she continued onward with that ‘strange device’ held in her heart, on her lips and pulsing deep within her veins: “Excelsior!”

“She believed in the impossible,” writes Paulo, “and, for that reason, won a battle that everyone, including myself, considered to be lost. That is what marks out the warrior: the knowledge that willpower and courage are not the same thing. Courage can attract fear and adulation, but willpower requires patience and commitment. Men and women with immense willpower are generally solitary types and give off a kind of coolness” (23-24).

Mônica, still Paulo’s agent, won her victory and now the world knows Paulo Coelho and can enjoy his stories.

Writing is such a lonely and solitary profession, and as a writer I have often thought the same: if only one person could believe in me as much as Mônica who knows what I could do as a writer. Who knows what the world would be like if each of us had someone who believed in us as we believe in ourselves. But far too often—much like Robin Williams—we go through life alone, without our champion, our guide, our saving grace.

But Paulo soon discovers about Chinese Bamboo, which should be very useful for those out there with unrealized dreams, for those out there persisting day in and day out exhibiting willpower which far too often goes unnoticed. Patience, after all, is not a virtue but a habit, and who cares for such habits? Who in this day and age, in societies where heavily armed police brutalize, and at times kill, unarmed civilians, who cares for patience and willpower and courage and intellect? Who wants to be anyone else’s champion but his or her own?

But Paulo, through his quick study on Chinese bamboo, learns that patience can actually mean something far more rewarding than what most people at first realize.

Paulo is at a dinner party with his various publishers from around Europe and he is taking J.’s advice to put himself out there. Paulo, much to Mônica’s dismay, is accepting invitations to book events in several different countries and at extremely short notice.

‘Have you gone mad?’ [Mônica asks.]

‘Oh, I went mad years ago. Do you know anything about Chinese bamboo? It apparently spends five years as a little shoot, using that time to develop its root system. And then, from one moment to the next it puts on a spurt and grows up to twenty-five metres high.’

‘And what has that got to do with the act of insanity I’ve just witnessed?’

‘Later on, I’ll tell you about the conversation I had a month ago with J. What matters now, though, is that this is precisely what has been happening to me: I’ve invested work, time and effort; I tried to encourage my personal growth with love and dedication, but nothing happened. Nothing happened for years.’

‘What do you mean ‘nothing happened’? Have you forgotten who you are?’

The taxi arrives. The Russian publisher opens the door for Mônica.

‘I’m talking about the spiritual side of my life. I think I’m like that Chinese bamboo plant and that my fifth year has just arrived. It’s time for me to start growing again. You asked me if I’d gone mad and I answered with a joke. But the fact is, I have been going mad. I was beginning to believe that nothing I had learned had put down any roots’ (27).

Perhaps you are not where you want to be just yet because you are still growing a strong foundation of roots, values and skills that will hold you true to your course through the good times and the bad.

We all can’t be like Paulo Coelho or like Robin Williams, great men who helped change the world for the better with their talent and their personality and their words. But what we can do, much like Paulo, is to never give up. To strive to be better each day. To have faith in patience and willpower and not in instant gratification. To trust destiny and believe in God’s plan for our lives. To follow the Universe until each one of our dreams are realized and we can say, without fail: I made some mistakes, but I wasn’t a coward. I lived my life and did what I had to do.

And if you are like many and still not satisfied and still want to know what happened to the sexy violinist and Paulo, well, you will just have to read the book, which is a strong recommend.

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Manuscript Found in Accra by Paulo Coelho

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Manuscript Found in Accra (2012) by Paulo Coelho is one of those books you’d like to keep by your bedside to read a chapter each night before sleep or upon waking early in the morning. The chapters are divided into the following categories the Copt discusses to a crowd in Jerusalem on the eve of a battle: Defeat; The Defeated Ones; Solitude; Usefulness & Uselessness; Change; Beauty; Uncertainty; Lost Loves; Choices; Sex; Love & Friendship; Elegance; Work; Luck & Success; Miracles; Anxiety; the Future & Dreams; Loyalty; Personal Weapons & Wisdom; Enemies; and three brief concluding anecdotes from a Rabbi, an Imam, and a Christian Priest. The book is a total of 190 pages, making it a swift read for those days when you just need some positive insight and motivation into life’s long and weary road.

To begin, one young man who was not chosen to go to war against the invading army outside the walls of Jerusalem says to the Holy Man: “My city thinks I am not good enough to fight. I am useless” (p 35).

And the Copt replies:

“In a desperate attempt to give meaning to life, many turn to religion, because a struggle in the name of a faith is always a justification for some grand action that could transform the world. ‘We are doing God’s work,’ they tell themselves.

“And they become devout followers, then evangelists, and finally, fanatics.

“They don’t understand that religion was created in order to share the mystery and to worship, not to oppress or convert others. The greatest manifestation of the miracle of God is life…

“Ask a flower in the field: ‘Do you feel useful? After all, you do nothing but produce the same flowers over and over.

“And the flower will answer: ‘I am beautiful, and beauty is my reason for living” (p 39-40).

The Copt continues to discuss what it means to be useful:

“A life is never useless. Each soul that came down to Earth is here for a reason.

“The people who really help others are not trying to be useful, but are simply leading a useful life. They rarely give advice, but serve as an example.

“Do one thing: Live the life you always wanted to live. Avoid criticizing others and concentrate on fulfilling your dreams. This may not seem very important to you, but God, who sees all, knows that the example you give is helping Him to improve the world. And each day, He will bestow more blessings upon it” (p 42).

And Lou Holtz, retired football player/coach/author/motivational speaker, said it best: “I can’t believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary.”

And the Universe knows this as well: that each person has greatness within. And most often people choose to ignore such greatness and they believe in the ordinary and the tame and the uselessness of their existence.

But much of this has to do with a fear of change.

And the Copt replies to such fears concerning change:

“Dreaming carries no risks. The dangerous thing is trying to transform your dreams into reality.

“But the day will come when Fate knocks on our door. It might be the gentle tapping of the Angel of Good Fortune or the unmistakable rat-a-tat-tat of the Unwanted Visitor [Death]. They both say: ‘Change now!’ Not next week, not next month, not next year. The angels say: ‘Now!’” (p 48)

And it was the great Roman emperor/philosopher/warrior Marcus Aurelius who said it clearest: “The Universe is change.”

But the new day begins and we drag ourselves out of our beds to our jobs that do not fulfil us, do not complete us, nor give birth to who we really are on the inside. And such labor, such duty is either constant agony or our greatest challenge. But what of this work? the people of Jerusalem ask.

The Copt answers:

“There are two types of work.

“The first is the work we do because we have to in order to earn our daily bread. In that case, people are merely selling their time, not realizing that they can never buy it back.

“They spend their entire existence dreaming of the day when they can finally rest. When that day comes, they will be too old to enjoy everything life has to offer. Such people never take responsibility for their actions. They say: ‘I have no choice.’

“However, there is another type of work, which people also do in order to earn their daily bread, but in which they try to fill each minute with dedication and love for others…

“There is no point saying: ‘Fate was unfair to me. While others are following their dreams, here I am just doing my job and earning my living.

“Fate is never unfair to anyone. We are all free to love or hate what we do.

“When we love, we find the same joy in our daily activity as do those who one day set off in search of their dreams.

“No one can know the importance or greatness of what they do. Therein lies the mystery and the beauty of the Offering: it is the mission that was entrusted to us, and we, in turn, need to trust it” (p 117-120).

And another great man by the name of Erich Fromm, a German psychologist/humanistic philosopher/sociologist, added to these thoughts years ago: “Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become who he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.”

And the Copt continues:

“The person who has set off in search of his dreams will also have moments when he regrets his decision, and then all he wants is to go back and find a job that will pay him enough to survive.

“The following day, though, the heart of every worker or every adventurer will once again be filled with euphoria and confidence. Both will see the fruits of the Offering and will be glad.

“Because both are singing the same song: the song of joy in the task that was entrusted to them.

“The poet would die of hunger if there were no shepherds. The shepherd would die of sadness if he could not sing the words of the poet.

“Through the Offering you are allowing others to love you. And you are teaching others to love through what you offer them” (p 120-121).

And it is this love that fuels the heart of those mad few who are courageous enough to chase after their dreams, even when their friends/family/teachers refuse to help. But the dreamers must go on, driven not by fame or riches or glory but by the all-powerful love for what they do and how such love can shape the world for the better. But the envious do not see such love and hope such dreamers will fail, despite the envious being dreamers also and wishing secretly for their own success.

And the Copt speaks at length of such success:

“Success does not come from having one’s work recognized by others. It is the fruit of a seed that you lovingly planted.

“When harvest time arrives, you can say to yourself: ‘I succeeded.’

“You succeeded in gaining respect for your work because you did not work only to survive, but to demonstrate your love for others.

“You managed to finish what you began even though you did not foresee all the traps along the way. And when your enthusiasm waned because of the difficulties you encountered, you reached for discipline. And when discipline seemed about to disappear because you were tired, you used your moments of repose to think about what steps you needed to take in the future” (p 125).

And we-dreamers-of-the-universe cannot achieve success alone, nor do we try. But far too often people of this world would rather take bribes or exchange socio-status-quid-pro-quo than to lend an honest helping hand down to pull someone up. The world often chooses to push people down rather than lifting them to a better place.

And the Copt continues:

“And when you realized that you would have to ask for help, you did not feel humiliated. And when you learned that someone needed help, you showed them all that you had learned without fearing that you might be revealing secrets or being used by others…

“Success comes to those who do not waste time comparing what they are doing with what others are doing; it enters the house of the person who says ‘I will do my best’ every day…

“Not everyone who owns a pile of gold the size of that hill to the south of our city is rich. The truly rich person is the one who is in contact with the energy of Love every second of his existence” (p 126-127).

And still there will be times when on the path of success we must stop and ask ourselves:

“Are my values still intact?

“Am I trying to please others and do what they expect of me, or am I really convinced that my work is a manifestation of my soul and my enthusiasm?

“Do I want success at any price or do I want to be a successful person because I manage to fill my days with Love?” (p 127)

And the Copt tells of what ‘real success’ is:

“Because that is what real success means: enriching your life, not cramming your coffers with gold” (p 127).

But as we dream we work day in and day out with love in our hearts for the joys of our labors alone and wait and wait and wait and it is this testing of one’s patience that tries the heart the most.

And the Copt replies to this impatience:

“Respect the time between sowing and harvesting.

“Then await the miracle of the transformation…

“Meanwhile: if anyone did dare ask, the answer would be: I considered giving up. I thought God was no longer listening to me, I often had to change direction, and, on other occasions, I lost my way. Despite everything, though, I found it again and carried on, because I was convinced there was no other way to live my life.

“I learned which bridges should be crossed and which should be burned…

“What is success?

“It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace” (p 128-129).

And as we lay our heads down with our souls at peace with the world, with our fates, with our victories and defeats, we know that “the great wisdom of life is to realize that we can be the masters of the things that try to enslave us” (p 146).

And still our unfulfilled dreams carry us forward through the good times and the bad. Through sunny days and stormy ones. And still there will be those doubters who question your dreams and try to make you feel guilty and ask, “Who are you to dare to dream your dream?”

And the Copt answers these half-dead souls:

“Our dream, the desire that is in our soul, did not come out of nowhere. Someone placed it there. And that

Someone, who is pure love and wants only our happiness, did so only because he also gave us the tools to realize our dreams and our desires…

“Love—because you will be the first to benefit. The world around you will reward you, even if, at first, you say to yourself: ‘They don’t understand my love.’

“Love does not need to be understood. It needs only to be shown…

“The greatest gift God gave us is the power to make decisions.

“We were all told from childhood that what we wanted to do was impossible. As we accumulate years, we also accumulate the sand of prejudices, fears, and guilt.

“Free yourself from that. Not tomorrow, not tonight, but now…

“And precisely when everything seems to be going well and your dream is almost within your grasp, that is when you must be more alert than ever. Because when your dream is almost with your grasp, you will be assailed by terrible guilt.

“You will see that you are about to arrive at a place where very few have ever set foot, and you will think that you don’t deserve what life is giving you.

“You will forget all the obstacles you overcame, all that you suffered and sacrificed. And because of that feeling of guilt, you could unconsciously destroy everything that took you so long to build…

“But if a man understands that he is worthy of what he has struggled so long for, he will realize that he did not get there alone and must respect the Hand that led him.

“Only someone capable of honoring each step he takes can comprehend his own worth” (p 152-155).

And so we must ask ourselves each day: “Do I honor each step I must take to realize my dreams?”

I know I certainly have.

And when that is the case, there is but one thing left to do.

The Copt ends the book by saying:

“Blessed are those who hear these words or read this manuscript, because the veil will be rent from top to bottom, and there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed to you.

“Go in peace” (p 190).

Yes. Vaya con Dios, and may all your dreams turn into sweet successes and your heart be full with love and joy each moment of each day.

For that is all anyone can ever ask out of life.

Keep reading and smiling…

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The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Pilgrimage (1987) by Paulo Coelho was first published under the title O diario de um Mago (or “The Diary of a Magus”), and the current title is a far better fit for Paulo’s journey along the Road to Santiago in 1986, which also led, a year later, to the inspiring story The Alchemist, which has enchanted the world ever since.

And if you have read The Alchemist, you begin to see the story of the shepherd boy unfold in the pages and journey of Paulo’s The Pilgrimage and his search for his sword and to fully understand “agape.”

In the section titled “Conquest” the reader can begin to see the makings of the shepherd Santiago, the protagonist in The Alchemist:

“I studied the view that surrounded us: a few peasant houses, the tower of the castle, the undulating fields ready for sowing. To my right appeared a shepherd, guiding his flock past the walls of the castle, bound for home. The sky was red, and the dust raised by the animals blurred the view, making it look like a dream or a magic vision. The shepherd waved to us, and we waved back…”

“A sound from the streets of the abandoned city caught the animal’s attention. I looked in the direction of the sound and saw a shepherd returning from the fields with his flock. I remembered that I had seen this scene before, in the ruins of an old castle” (p 165, 200).

In 2011, Paulo writes of his journey across Spain to Compostela (the Latin name originally being Campus Stellae, “Field of the Star” [p 280]):

“It’s hard to believe that twenty-five years have passed since I made my first (and only) pilgrimage on foot to Santiago de Compostela. It was a decisive moment, when I stopped dithering and resolved to devote myself to one thing I had dreamed of doing: writing. It’s even harder to believe that The Pilgrimage, published for the first time in 1987 by a small publisher in Rio, is still one of my most sold and most widely translated books around the world. And so, in this commemorative edition, I would like to go back a little in time and observe myself” (p vii).

Most people I meet dream of doing one thing and doing one thing very well. These same people, however, delay the day when the choice must be made: sacrifice everything for the dream or sacrifice the dream for everyone else. Like Paulo, I too have had to make such a choice, resolving and devoting myself to the one thing I dream of doing: writing.
And the decision, a first step, is not as rewarding as the daily activity over the years that build into memories and works from doing what you love: your Personal Legend (as Paulo explains in The Alchemist).

And before we step onto the Road to Santiago with Paulo, he offers some special advice about our Personal Legends:

“We are all chosen, if, instead of wondering, What am I doing here? we decide to do something that fills our hearts with enthusiasm.

“It’s that enthusiasm that connects us to the Holy Spirit, not the hundreds and thousands of readings of the classic texts. It’s wanting to believe that life is a miracle that enables other miracles to happen, not the so-called ‘secret rituals’ or ‘initiatory orders’. In short, it’s a man’s decision to fulfill his destiny that really makes him a man—not the theories that he concocts about the mystery of existence” (p vii-ix).

And for the past 15 years I wake up and constantly make the decision to fulfill my destiny, and I have often felt the same to Paulo, that this decision and my actions through each moment to be a writer (past, present, future) makes me a man, and to do otherwise would suck the life out of me and discard my soul onto the heap of so many others who have abandoned themselves and their dreams.

And as Paulo decides to leave his job and salary in Brazil and make the trip to Spain and his destiny, he opens a door for us and reveals his little secret—this man, who in 1986, the world knew nothing about:

“I need to change, follow the direction of my dream, a dream that seems to me childish, ridiculous and impossible, and which I’ve never had the courage to realize: to become the writer I have secretly always wanted to be” (x).

And so we begin the journey with Paulo, who at the time of his pilgrimage and the start of his dreams was almost 40 years-old.

At the time of Paulo’s journey the Road to Santiago was not as popular as it is today, but no less as important as it was then. In the year he made the pilgrimage, “only 400 people had traveled” the Road and in 2005, “according to non-official statistics, 400 people passed every day in front of the bar” where Paulo sat with his guide Petrus for coffee (p x).

“Just as the Muslin tradition requires that all members of the faith, at least once in their life, make the same pilgrimage that Muhammad made from Mecca to Medina, so Christians in the first millennium considered three routes to be sacred. Each of them offered a series of blessings and indulgences to those who traveled its length” (p 12).

As Petrus and Paulo start their trip they encounter an interesting character on this highly religious route.

“Petrus smiled and said that we should move along. I picked up my things, and we began to walk in silence. From Petrus’s smile I knew that he was thinking the same thing I was.

“We had met with the devil” (p 25).

And this devil will not be the last Paulo faces on his journey of self-discovery and mastery over his senses while he searches for his lost sword. But like all people at some point in their lives when they are faced with a task they hope to achieve, Paulo is filled with doubt.

“I looked up at the sky, the Milky Way spread across it, reflecting the immensity of the Road we would have to travel. This immensity made me very anxious; it created a terrible fear that I would not be able to succeed—that I was too small for this task” (p 34-35).

But who hasn’t felt this way? Who hasn’t let doubt enter close like one does a friend in troublesome times?

And it is with such honesty and sincerity that Paulo, as man and writer, pulls us deeper into his spiritual battles along this ancient road of pilgrims, then and now. And as the days pass, Paulo contemplates topics like God, devils, angels, destiny, sin:

“The word peccadillo, which means a ‘small sin,’ comes from pecus, which means ‘defective foot,’ a foot that is incapable of walking a road. The way to correct the peccadillo is always to walk forward, adapting oneself to new situations and receiving in return all of the thousands of blessings that life generously offers those who seek them” (p 38).
And on we journey with our sins and defective parts through small, quaint villages, past archaic churches, and over and down timeless mountain paths when Paulo gets a glimpse into the world around him:

“I looked at the small village there in front of me and began to create a story about it; the delight in finding people and lodging after the cold wind of the Pyrenees. At one point, I sensed that there was in the village a strong, mysterious, and all-knowing presence. My imagination peopled the plain with knights and battles. I could see their swords shining in the sun and hear the cries of war. The village was no longer just a place where I could warm my soul with wine and my body with a blanket; it was a historic monument, the work of heroic people who had left everything behind to become a part of that solitary place. The world was there around me, and I realized that seldom had I paid attention to it” (p 46-47).

And there is a beautiful world all around us every moment. A world filled with stories that we may know or not know, that may continue to live in the minds of locals or have long been forgotten. At one place an old man tells Paulo of a princess who had walked the Road to Santiago and on her return stopped and gave her life for her love. A place, as the old man says, love was murdered (p 56).

“Petrus had lit one of his horrible rolled cigarettes but despite his air of indifference, I could see that he was listening carefully to the old man’s story.

“‘Her brother, Duke Guillermo, was sent by their father to bring her home. But Felicia refused to go. In desperation, the duke fatally stabbed her there in that small church that you can see in the distance; she had built it with her own hands in order to care for the poor and offer praise to God.

“‘When he came to his senses and realized what he had done, the duke went to Rome to ask the pope’s forgiveness. As penitence, the pope ordered him to walk to Compostela. Then a curious thing happened: on his way back, when he arrived here, he had the same impulse as his sister, and he stayed on, living in that little church that his sister had built, caring for the poor until the last days of his long life” (p 56).

And as Paulo tries to make sense of this story and the meaning of the Road, Petrus offers some guiding advice of who the Road and its secrets are actually meant for:

“Petrus on the other hand, argued that the guiding concept along the Road to Santiago was its simplicity. That the Road was one along which any person could walk, that its significance could be understood by even the least sophisticated person, and that, in fact, only such a road as that could lead to God. So Petrus thought my relationship to God was based too much on concept, on intellect, and on reasoning; I felt that his was too simplistic and intuitive” (p 57).

And soon after Paulo and Petrus debate the meaning of God and how love could ever come to be murdered:

Petrus enters into a diatribe, one of many more interesting ones throughout the book:

“‘God was manifest in the caves and in the thunderstorms of prehistory. After people began to see God’s hand in the caves and thunderstorms, they began to see him in the animals and in special places in the forest. During certain difficult times, God existed only in the catacombs of the great cities. But through all of time, he never ceased to live in the human heart in the form of love…

“‘When Father Jordi cited that quotation from Jesus, saying that wherever your treasure is, there also would your heart be, he was referring to the importance of love and good works. Wherever it is that you want to see the face of God, there you will see it. And if you don’t want to see it, that doesn’t matter, so long as you are performing good works. When Felicia of Aquitaine built her small church and began to help the poor, she forgot about the God of the Vatican. She became God’s manifestation by becoming wiser and by living a simpler life—in other words, through love. It is in that respect that the old man was absolutely right in saying that love had been murdered…

“I explained that in my country the law of return said that people’s deformities and diseases were punishments for mistakes committed in previous incarnations.

“‘Nonsense,’ said Petrus. ‘God is not vengeance, God is love. His only form of punishment is to make someone who interrupts a work of love continue it’” (p 58-59).

And our dreams are often interrupted by those closest to us. These loved ones and friends either do not believe in helping others achieve another’s sacred assignment (i.e., our Personal Legends) or who are too envious to help.
These kinds of people desire to create negativity and conflict rather than positivity and assistance.

But if we truly believe in ourselves, find ourselves worthy and expect to achieve our dreams, we must not lose faith and we must choose to listen to our hearts.

We must fight the good fight and believe.

“We must never stop dreaming,” writes Paulo, “Dreams provide nourishment for the soul, just as a meal does for the body. Many times in our lives we see our dreams shattered and our desires frustrated, but we have to continue dreaming. If we don’t, our soul dies, and agape cannot reach it…

“The good fight is the one we fight because our heart asks it of us. In the heroic ages—at the time of the knights in armor—this was easy. There were lands to conquer and much to do. Today, though, the world has changed a lot, and the good fight has shifted from the battlefields to the fields within ourselves.

“The good fight is the one that’s fought in the name of our dreams. When we’re young and our dreams first explode inside us with all of their force, we are very courageous, but we haven’t yet learned how to fight…

“We kill our dreams because we are afraid to fight the good fight” (p 61-62).

And there are times we kill our dreams because those we love—or our closet companions or our dearest friends—ask it of us. Sometimes we kill our dreams for our husbands and wives, for our children, for our parents and teachers. And if we do so, we grow bitter and our hopes of living the life we always dreamed of slips into hatred and anger.

Our dreams should be realized and lived. Then our realized-legends will inspire others around us who will then inspire others and on and on until humanity can evolve as one species.

But giving up on our individual dreams can be easy.

“‘And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace,” explains Petrus to Paulo. ‘Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams—we have refused to fight the good fight.’

“The tower of the church kept changing; now it appeared to be an angel with its wings spread. The more I blinked, the longer the figure remained. I wanted to speak to Petrus but I sensed that he hadn’t finished” (p 63).

And further down the Road, as Paulo continues to see angels and listens to Petrus’s words of wisdom, there is still “agape” to learn and devils to fight. One is named Legion.

“Everything began to blur, and I heard only very faintly the woman repeat to Petrus that we had to leave. I was in a state of euphoria, and I decided to speak the strange words that were coming to my mind.

“All I could see in the room was the dog. When I began to say those strange words, the dog started to growl. He understood what I was saying. I became more excited and continued to speak, louder and louder. The dog rose and bared his teeth. He was no longer the docile animal I had seen on arrival but something awful and threatening that could attack me at any moment. I knew that the words were protecting me, and I began to speak even louder, focusing all of my energies on the dog. I felt that I had a different power within me and that it could keep the animal from attacking me” (p 95-96).

And what were these strange words exactly? What strange language was Paulo speaking to the demon-filled dog named Legion? Paulo’s guide, Petrus, has an answer.

“I had already heard some things about divine graces, but I asked Petrus to explain them to me.

“‘They are gifts from the Holy Ghost that manifest themselves in people. There are a number of different kinds: the gift of curing, the gift of miracles, the gift of prophecy, among others. You experienced the gift of tongues, which is what the apostles experienced at Pentecost.

“‘The gift of tongues is related to direct communication with the Holy Ghost. It is used in powerful oratory, in exorcisms—as was your case—and in wisdom” (p 102).

Paulo and Petrus leave the cursed house after Legion has fled but this demon-dog will return to hunt Paulo down for a final battle.

In the meantime, Paulo attends a wedding party and still has not learned the meaning and essence of love.

“‘Which kind of love are you talking about: eros, philos, or agape?’

“The man looked at him blankly. Petrus got up, filled his cup, and asked me to walk with him.

“‘There are three Greek words that mean love,’ he began. ‘Today, you are seeing a manifestation of eros, the feeling of love that exists between two people’… (p 114-115)

“‘What is philos?’

“‘Philos is love in the form of friendship. It’s what I feel toward you and others. When the flame of eros stops burning, it is philos that keeps a couple together.’

“‘And agape?’ (p 118-119)

“‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels…and though I have the gift of prophecy…and have all faith so that I could remove mountains…and have not love, I am nothing.’

“Petrus was once again quoting from Saint Paul” (p 121).

“‘Agape is total love. It is the love that consumes the person who experiences it. Whoever knows and experiences agape learns that nothing else in the world is important—just love. This was the kind of love that Jesus felt for humanity, and it was so great that it shook the stars and changed the course of history. His solitary life enabled him to accomplish things that kings, armies, and empires could not…

“‘Agape is the love that consumes,’ he repeated, as if that were the phrase that best defined this strange kind of love. ‘Martin Luther King once said that when Christ spoke of loving one’s enemies, he was referring to agape. Because according to him, it was “impossible to like our enemies, those who were cruel to us, those who tried to make our day-to-day suffering even worse.” But agape is much more than liking. It is a feeling that suffuses, that fills every space in us, and turns our aggression to dust…

“‘You and I and most pilgrims who walk the Road to Santiago, learning the RAM practices*, experience agape in its other form: enthusiasm…

“‘For the ancients, enthusiasm meant trance, or ecstasy—a connection with God. Enthusiasm is agape directed at a particular idea or a specific thing. We have all experienced it. When we love and believe from the bottom of our heart, we feel ourselves to be stronger than anyone in the world, and we feel a serenity that is based on the certainty that nothing can shake our faith. This unusual strength allows us always to make the right decision at the right time, and when we achieve our goal, we are amazed at our own capabilities. Because when we are involved in the good fight, nothing else is important; enthusiasm carries us toward our goal…

“‘When Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven belonged to the children, he was referring to agape in the form of enthusiasm. Children were attracted to him, not because they understood his miracles, his wisdom, or his Pharisees and apostles. They went to him in joy, moved by enthusiasm…

“‘Human beings are the only ones in nature who are aware that they will die. For that reason and only for that reason, I have a profound respect for the human race, and I believe that its future is going to be much better than its present. Even knowing that their days are numbered and that everything will end when they least expect it, people make of their lives a battle that is worthy of a being with eternal life. What people regard as vanity—leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one’s name from being forgotten—I regard as the highest expression of human dignity…

“Agape is grander than our ordinary human concepts, and everyone thirsts for it” (p 126-128, 146, 190).

And Paulo continues down the Road to Santiago with Petrus, his trusty guide, much like Don Quixote with his squire Sancho, battling monstrous windmills in the form of demon-dogs and enchanted waterfalls and learning about the human race and himself as he crosses Spain.

I would like to tell you that Paulo defeated Legion, climbed and conquered a waterfall nude, walked the entire Road and learned many more life lessons, and in the end found his treasure, the sword of his destiny. But you will just have to read The Pilgrimage for yourself.

But let us remember one thing, as we come to our end:

“And when I think about it,” writes Paulo in the end of his book, “I guess it is true that people always arrive at the right moment at the place where someone awaits them” (p 276).

So I hope when you arrive, wherever it may be, that someone special is also awaiting you, both your hearts filled with the three kinds of love: eros, philos, and agape.

Keep reading and smiling…

*RAM practices, practiced by Paulo during his journey along the Road to Santiago in 1986:

The Seed Exercise
The Speed Exercise
The Cruelty Exercise
The Messenger Exercise
The Water Exercise (The Arousal of Intuition)
The Blue Sphere Exercise
The Buried Alive Exercise
The RAM Breathing Exercise
The Shadows Exercise
The Listening Exercise
The Dance Exercise

Some Lessons for Pilgrims:

“You cannot judge the beauty of a particular path just by looking at the gate” (p 289).

“Try to travel alone or—if you are married—with your spouse.”

“You are not travelling in order to prove that you have a better life than other people—your aim is to find out how other people live, what they can teach you, how they deal with reality and with the extraordinary” (p 290).

“A city is like a capricious woman: she takes time to be seduced and to reveal herself completely” (p 291).

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In fact—regardless of the countless debates across beer soaked bars or dinner tables packed with steaming dishes—the dumbing of America has led to a serious threat to creative standards throughout the once-great-and-free-and-brave land of the Stars & Stripes. Such freedoms in American writing, however, do not exist and are validated by the recently harsh but fair criticism by Nobel judge Horace Engdahl in “Creative Writing Courses are Killing Western Literature” (The Guardian, 7 Oct. 2014).

Responding to the low-quality and poor ability of story-telling in American writers today, Horace argues that American literature has gotten worse in recent decades because such writing and publishing found in America has ‘arisen as a commodity.’ And writing in America has indeed become less of an art and more of a commodity. Horace, in his earnest but indirect appeal, supports the argument that international writers (like the French writer Patrick Modiano, who—if you are American—have likely never heard of) have a stronger command not of the language (as medium) but of story-telling: the ability to construct, shape and transmogrify events into a whole and unified illusion that transcends the dullness and illness of the American establishment of professional writers controlling and shaping the literary production in today’s market.

Regarding literature, the Western side apparently conflicts with the rest of the world and Horace believes this to be a problem because ‘when reading many writers from Asia and Africa,’ he claims, ‘one finds a certain liberty again.’ And just for those American readers, Horace fully and clearly explains himself: ‘I said that American literary life, American criticism and teaching were limited today by too narrow an access to world literature, because the number of translations and their reach in the US is feeble. Everything is focused around their [US] writers and their language, like a hall of mirrors which reflects a perpetual, infinite image of America.’

Patrick Modiano –the French writer I mentioned above—was awarded the Nobel Prize this year for his literature often dealing with Jewish experiences. The reason the Nobel committee found Patrick worthy was for the ‘art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.’ The ‘art of memory’ is exactly what American writers fail at achieving. Memory is not a linear process but a method of story-telling that may be considered as wily, intermittent, deviating, or even indirect. And let’s face it: Americans, being some of the most direct people in the world in almost all mannerisms, find it difficult to be progressive and ‘different’ or indirect or to have, in essence, the reader to infer meaning from the story-telling.

For American writers to be honest with themselves their egos must first admit that the international community notices a steep decline from the American writing community. And yet I have witnessed and read countless examples when stubborn and ignorant (i.e., uneducated) choices by American writers continue to infuse lower forms of story-telling. These kinds of American writers of fiction mean for their story’s characters to be replaced by simpletons, the Simpson-esque Homers, drugged induced imbeciles and these, in truth, are caricatures safely distancing readers from what could be real-living-breathing people on the page. Profound messages, as well, are instead dwindled down into red-necked, sexpotic vomit (Fifty Shades of Grey, anyone?) that ignorant or bored Americans happily swallow as good literature while world critics and readers take a firm pass.

Paulo Coelho, probably the world’s foremost writer of this generation celebrated through the vast translations of his words, fits nicely into the modus operandi of Faulkner, Fowles and the Japanese Nobel-nominee Haruki Murakami.

Paulo knows the illusions he wishes to create in his fans/readers and he knows which parts of the craft to amplify at key points. But what makes Paulo popular is that his profound message of insight and positivity to receive the Universe as a guide and gift remain profound—take The Alchemist (1988) as a prime example—while the American public, surprisingly, continue to celebrate Paulo’s enlightened style of writing.

Too bad Paulo is Brazilian with ties to Spanish and Portuguese readers, much like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who both write in a style conjoined to the preferences of the international community of readers.

Anyone who has read Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) can attest to the mad delusions and exotic style found in this fictional story—a style, quite assuredly—would be reprimanded in American MFA programs and writing workshops throughout the country as amateurish and unconventional and too progressive—and if such a style is acceptable in American fiction it is only so because of Marquez’s genius. Meanwhile, American writing professors scoff at such flamboyant attempts at genius. But genius often holds other noble qualities, such as courage, determination and vision.

Murakami, a Rowling-like sensation in Japan who has been translated into over fifty languages, compelled the international community last year to take notice with his thirteenth novel called Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. He has been known for his eccentric novels that leap the boundaries of time and place and grab the hearts and minds of readers by telling stories of the extraordinary.

Sean O’Hagan in The Observer describes Murakami as an author who ‘incorporates elements of magic realism, science fiction and Japanese mythology.’ In any American MFA program, incorporating such anti-mainstream elements into a single novel is purely a NO-NO. Sean goes on to explain that Murakami has ‘reached an apogee of sorts with his most recent novel’ and that the three-volume story named 1Q84 (2009) was in turn mesmerizing yet baffling ‘with its bewildering and, in places, disturbing plot.’ 1Q84, Sean explains, involves ‘a female character who wandered off a freeway into a parallel universe and a darkly mystical cult led by a self-styled prophet who indulged in creepy sex with the young female assassin hired by a mysterious dowager to kill him.’ Any American writer of the mainstream-publishing establishment in New York will reject any amateur writer, and most professional ones as well, for ideas as wild and iconoclastic and ungoverned as the plot and characters found in 1Q84.

These above mentioned writers shape illusions by any means necessary, which often defy and rebuke the American trained caliber of writing that restricts itself to singular modes of genre, points-of-view and time ordered events heavy on the A-to-B-to-C equation.

Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie also come to mind. Both are considered British novelists who hold sway in the international dialogue of fiction writing. These two writers are not the exceptions; Ian and Salman are, instead, the models by which American writers should challenge themselves to emulate in order to strive for a more international presence and international audience (please kindly note: an American writer being translated into different worldly languages doesn’t make an American writer ‘international’; being ‘international’ is when a translated work transcends cultures to impact readers across borders, both physical and metaphysical; American writers, time and time again, fail to do this).

Thomas Pynchon, a seventy-seven-year-old American writer known for his ‘genre-bending postmodern works of fiction’ was among the finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature this year (The Telegraph). The American counterpart nominated alongside legendary Pynchon for the Top Prize for Literature in the World went to Robert Allen Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan. That’s right. Bob. Freakin’. Dylan. A singer. That is the best American fiction and non-fiction writers could do this past year. No American writer has won the prestigious prize since Toni Morrison (whose actual name is Chloe Ardelia Wofford) did it in 1993, and her fiction is on the level of Pynchon’s extreme and unorthodox style as well. But the actual American influence in world literature gets worse.

Before Toni, the list of Americans who won the Nobel Prize becomes pretty bleak: in 1987, Joseph Brodsky (Language: English); in 1980, Czeslaw Milosz, from Poland (Language: Polish); in 1978, Issac Bashevis Singer, born in the Russian Empire (Yiddish Language); in 1976, Saul Bellow, born in Canada (English); and to find in the last fifty-two years the only other ‘truly’ American writer (and I mean bred, born, raised in the Land of Stars and Stripes and writing in the native English language) an American audience must go back to 1962 when John Steinbeck won the Prize. Sad. Sad. Sad this state of American influence in writing in the last half century.

Salman Rushdie, winner of the Best of the Bookers (2008)—a feat achieved by no other writer, American or British, in the last half century—constantly challenges the notion of story-telling, only to excel at his task; but most American writers are taught through MFA programs and writing workshops not to strive for such excellence in story-telling.

“‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh?’ (p 3), and such begins Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) as two men fall from an airplane blown to smithereens, and later: “‘Listen,’ Zeeny put her arm through his. ‘Listen to my Salad. Suddenly he wants to be Indian after spending his life trying to turn white. All is not lost, you see. Something in there still alive.’ And Chamcha felt himself flushing, felt the confusion mounting. India; it jumbled things up.

“‘For Pete’s sake,’ she added, knifing him with a kiss. ‘Chamcha. I mean, fuck it. You name yourself Mister Toady and you expect us not to laugh’” (p 54). And for good reason, the international community doesn’t laughingly ignore Salman or his genius.

Hemingway—God, love him—through such American classics as A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and A Moveable Feast (1964), helped make the creative non-fiction style of novel writing found in the popular demand of American fiction today. And this formulaic style has infested and symbiotically attached itself to American fiction writing ever since In Cold Blood by Truman Capote was published in September, 1965. If there ever was an invisible chimera in American fiction, memoir-and-creative-non-fiction-esque fiction top the charts as it breathes death inside international readers. Stories used to serve a purpose through its fantastical possibilities. In American publishing today fiction and non-fiction has devolved into a commodity, and the international intelligentsia are asking themselves, ‘Why are American adults reading children and young adult novels?’ (Not that there is anything wrong with that; even some adults must learn to read and think at some point.)

But time and time again non-American writers receive the due acclaim with truly fictional illusions that begs the question: when will American writers humble themselves and realize that, perhaps, their method of story-telling and their diseased understanding of constructing stories is not the most popular, not the most recognized, not the most accepted, not even the most worldly method in writing today? But when has that ever bothered American writers before anyway?

Stories, in essence, are created illusions that must be whole and unified throughout each telling or each reading. Stories must be whole within its constructed illusion in regards of the plot climaxing and finding its last breath in the listener’s/reader’s heart, filled with a complete understanding of the world, the characters and the message the telling/reading of the story carried from a beginning to a definitive end (for that particular story or novel).

Stories must also be unified within its constructed illusion, and ‘unified’ can be room enough for writers and readers alike to debate. Unified—not the absolute definition by any means, much like any abstract concept when applied in concrete terms—can mean the ultimate collection of technique that shapes a story into a natural ordering of lived illusions that shape a well-rounded telling/reading into a full understanding of events and characters.

Take Faulkner, as one example, and his ability to weave multiple perceptions and various linguistic boxes (i.e., the use of varying voice patterns, lexicon and degrees of selected ‘tellings’ of specific events) in The Sound and the Fury (1929). Granted this novel may be considered as ‘dated’ since having been first published eighty-five years ago. But before I argue more modern examples, let us concentrate on Faulkner.

In The Sound and the Fury Faulkner constructs a whole and unified story from broken pieces of a family’s narrative puzzle that, by book’s end, shapes a complete and marrying illusion for the listener/reader. In effect, despite defying American contemporaries’ sense of style and choice to develop such ‘whole and unified’ illusions through linear, singular point-of-view-first-person narratives, Faulkner’s genius lies in the ability to ignore such current American tendencies and their writing commandments that have now invaded American literature and infested MFA programs throughout the United States.

One such problem is the neologistic-absurdities found when confronting the throne-like status one creative writing professor after another spouts off in inculcated tradition that an amateur writer should ‘show, not tell,’ when in fact no writer, professional or otherwise, ever really ‘shows’ a story.

Stories are to be told, and one must ‘tell’ a story in order for the illusion to be grounded in the reality found in fiction. ‘Showing’ confuses the craft element and deconstructs a story into a sequence of he-said-she-said-he-did-this-she-did-that and often exclude the Nobel-winning Faulkner (who was awarded the prize in 1949). Even Faulkner asserted to his writing as a means ‘to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.’ And in this act of creation, Faulkner established the illusion by pulling together pieces collected in ways stories are able to be told. There is not just one way to tell/write a story, much to the dismay of the American writing programs.

Non-American writers have been far more successful than American writers at this ability to create a shared illusion among listeners/readers that appeal more to an international audience than an American one. American writers seem to care to write only for American audiences, and this is a shame.

John Fowles, an English novelist, successfully engages the international community with works inspired by Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, a technique often frowned upon in American writing circles. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) Fowles’s novel has its writer-creator-god enter the story and turn back his pocketwatch chained to his vest and, thereby, create two separate endings: one happy, one sad.

Such room for liberal creation has been frequently abandoned in MFA programs and writing workshops in America, and the reason for rebuking such aesthetic techniques in the craft is often stuffed into phrases like ‘experimental’ and ‘genius’ as writing professors exclaim to their wide-eared writing students, ‘Don’t do it at all, or at least if you won’t listen to me, do it if you must because you’re a genius and a genius, I assure you, you are not.’

Such is the American tragedy and no living writer today will ever write the Great American Novel.

What American and International readers should be hoping for instead is for more American writers to stand up and respectably join the international dialogue found in truly creative writing and its fiction.

C.G. Fewston
Hong Kong, China
Oct. 31, 2014

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the privilege and honor to work with New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant and Wiley Cash. Among many others, his stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine, Driftwood Press, The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer, Moonlit Road, Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about him and his writing at www.cgfewston.me

His new novel, A Time to Love in Tehran, will be published in 2015.

View all my reviews

The Kite Runner (2003) by Khaled Hosseini is not a true story and this needs to be clear. Crystal clear. Much of the hype surrounding this fictive world from individuals who often spoke to me about this book was that the story was a true one. If you think Khaled is the boy Amir who witnesses his servant and childhood friend, Hassan, being anally raped in an alley and does nothing and then seeks a life-long journey of redemption, then I am afraid your credulity may make it difficult to separate fact from fiction in any story or event.

And in this social media age this phenomenon is ever growing among the masses concerning even diurnal activities of rather diminishing significance. I have told my university students “to wake up”—meaning to wake up to the real world and start thinking and acting for one’s self—and so it is also time for America and its readers to wake up to the absurdity and simplicity of reality in literature (if one can argue such a thing, and I know I can). To believe or not to believe, this too is a question one needs to consider.

In publishing, especially more so now than it was some ten years ago, Creative Non-Fiction and Memoir has taken precedence over Fiction. Readers want to not only hear a great story, immersing themselves into a vivid world, they also want to believe it’s real. These readers simply do not want to be tricked. And ultimately Fiction must use its craft tricks (the same as Creative Non-Fiction) in order to convince the reader of the validity of the story.

The times past where Coleridge’s 1817 “suspension of disbelief” reigned supreme among literature and readers (i.e., the reader was burdened with the effort of making an attempt at believing in a fiction and where the reader was expected not to consider the author was the narrator and/or the protagonist and/or the author was not related to any part of the narrative) is all but coming to an end.

Much of this failure to maintain a healthy suspension of disbelief and instead seek out a “promotion of belief” (i.e., the writer is burdened with the effort of making fiction believable and where the reader is expected to consider the author as the narrator and/or the protagonist and/or the author is in reality directly related to the narrative) is likely an effect from the market-voyeurism found in social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram. Most people these days want a glimpse into the “realness” of other people’s lives, and this too—in business—has created a culture driving for mindfulness and authenticity.

The problem with The Kite Runner, however, is when the public begins to blur the lines between author and story and believe that Fiction is Non-Fiction, and that story is fact or at least a memory of an event. This creates false empathetical sympathy from reader to author, therein further instigating a drive in unmerited sells. What should drive sells in every case of a new book, regardless if the author has written twenty books or is making a debut, should be the essence of the plot’s meaningfulness and its overall success to tell a story well and to have that narrative be partitioned into some realm that is considered to be art. And in the case of The Kite Runner the story just doesn’t hold up.

What the author, Khaled, does do well, as described above as in tricking the reader into believing this story is a true one (as in actually having happened to him when he was a boy), is first using a first person point-of-view narrator (e.g., “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years” [p1]), and incorporating his childhood home of Afghanistan and its culture into the fictive story (e.g., “When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the driveway of my father’s house and annoy our neighbors by reflecting sunlight into their homes with a shard of mirror. We would sit across from each other on a pair of high branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser pockets filled with dried mulberries and walnuts. We took turns with the mirror as we ate mulberries, pelted each other with them, giggling, laughing” [p3]). Here the combinations of first person “I” and details relating to specificity within a certain time period and place greatly enhance the likelihood of “tricking” the reader into a promotion of belief.

But as we dig deeper into the story these little tricks continue to lose strength and eventually become absurd mechanics with little to no weight regarding believability; even when the believability of a fiction should be much simpler than creating a promotion of belief for Creative Non-Fiction. But The Kite Runner’s narrative starts to show its holes and these holes drain any real pleasure from the reading experience.

Before the kite fighters take to the streets and before a very young and rich Amir wins the tournament (also not believable since everything good keeps happening to the master Amir and everything bad keeps happening to the servant Hassan), Hassan encourages Amir:

“Then he stepped toward me and, in a low voice, said something that scared me a little. ‘Remember, Amir agha. There’s no monster, just a beautiful day.’ How could I be such an open book to him when, half the time, I had no idea what was milling around in his head? I was the one who went to school, the one who could read, write. I was the smart one. Hassan couldn’t read a first-grade textbook but he’d read me plenty. That was a little unsettling, but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed” (p 68).

Certainly Hassan’s advice is sweet and sincere but it is clear this is an author and not a child shaping the characters’ dialogue and thoughts. And that, therefore, makes it hard to believe.

But what is really hard to believe is what Amir does after winning the kite tournament. Hassan (the kite runner) runs off to get the loser’s kite as a reward for his master Amir. As time passes, Hassan still has not returned and Amir goes in search of his servant and friend.

“There were two things amid the garbage that I couldn’t stop looking at: One was the blue kite resting against the wall, close to the cast-iron stove; the other was Hassan’s brown corduroy pants thrown on a heap of eroded bricks… [notice the key detail of “pants” here that invokes “trouser pockets” that appeared on page three, first paragraph and the constant mention of trousers, jeans, pants or “cowboy pants” throughout the novel]

“Assef knelt behind Hassan, put his hands on Hassan’s hips and lifted his bare buttocks. He kept one hand on Hassan’s back and undid his own belt buckle with his free hand. He unzipped his jeans. Dropped his underwear. He positioned himself behind Hassan. Hassan didn’t struggle. Didn’t even whimper. He moved his head slightly and I caught a glimpse of his face. Saw the resignation in it. It was a look I had seen before. It was the look of the lamb…

“I actually aspired to cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running [away], was that Assef was right: Nothing was free in this world. Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba. Was it a fair price? The answer floated to my conscious mind before I could thwart it: he was just a Hazara, wasn’t he?…

“And that was as close as Hassan and I ever came to discussing what had happened in the alley. I thought he might burst into tears, but, to my relief, he didn’t, and I pretended I hadn’t heard the crack in his voice. Just like I pretended I hadn’t seen the dark stain in the seat of his pants. Or those tiny drops that fell from between his legs and stained the snow black” (p 81, 82, 85, 86).

If you are still not clear as to what has happened in the three above paragraphs, let me sum it up:

A) Amir wins the kite fighting tournament after Hassan has encouraged him to face his fear,

B) Hassan, the kite runner, chases after the last kite to fall in hopes of returning it (which he does) to Amir so that Amir can take the kite to his father (Baba) and feel honored,

C) Amir watches Assef (the neighborhood bully who grows up to become a warlord who rapes children, even Hassan’s own son many years later) rape Hassan in an alley,

D) Amir hides the fact from Hassan that he knows of the rape,

E) Amir says nothing because Hassan is a Hazara and Amir is a Pashtun, a racial and ethnic divide that further establishes a chasm between two innocent, childhood friends,

F) Hassan limps off, bleeding on the snow, and Amir takes the blue kite to his father

G) Amir is seen as the hero of the day, Hassan draws inward,

H) And the story, sad to say, doesn’t get much better.

And what happens later in the book? (Stop now if you don’t want to know or keep reading if you want to save yourself some time and money…)

Amir grows up and becomes a successful novelist (again the rich benefiting from class status); Hassan grows up and remains poor and he and his wife are later executed outside Amir’s childhood home; Assef grows up to become a warlord to torture and rape more children; Hassan’s son, Sohrab, is also sexually abused by Assef, and Amir returns to Afghanistan to try and save Sohrab and bring him back to America.

As a whole story, The Kite Runner doesn’t meet the standard of what I would classify as beautiful art. As a parallel example, a female writer in the New York Times Bookends section confessed that one reader bought her used book for ten cents and after reading it the reader wanted to commit suicide (as a writer I work hard on my novels and never want any reader to feel demoralized but uplifted and inspired and I would have to seriously question the intent of my narrative decisions if any reader felt in such a way where they did not value life). There are, however, key moments along the way in The Kite Runner that do stand out and question the overall validity and believability of the plot.

Regardless, The Kite Runner does have its moments, and below is my favorite one:

Amir is alone with his father and they are about to have a conversation on theology, religion and morality,

“Do you want to know what your father thinks about sin?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” Baba said, “but first understand this and understand it now, Amir: You’ll never learn anything of value from those bearded idiots.”

“You mean Mullah Fatiullah Khan?”

Baba gestured with his glass. The ice clinked. “I mean all of them. Piss on the beards of all those self-righteous monkeys…”

“Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand?”

“No, Baba jan,” I said, desperately wishing I did. I didn’t want to disappoint him again…

“When you kill a man, you steal a life,” Baba said. “You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see…”

“There is no act more wretched than stealing, Amir,” Baba said. “A man who takes what’s not his to take, be it life or a loaf of naan…I spit on such a man. And if I ever cross paths with him, God help him. Do you understand?”

I found the idea of Baba clobbering a thief both exhilarating and terribly frightening (p 18-20).

I found The Kite Runner to have had some wonderful moments of moral inspiration that were, by the end, superseded by ghastly cases and examples of immorality that often slipped into mawkishness and simple absurdity. Not a strong recommend.

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of Their Town, forthcoming in 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish, 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks, 2012; and, The Convalescent, 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer, 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World, 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless, 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home, 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy, 2014). Among many others, his stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine, Driftwood Press, The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer, Moonlit Road, Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about him and his writing at www.cgfewston.me

His new novel, A Time to Love in Tehran, will be published in 2015.

 Click on the link below to read:

A Time to Love in Tehran by C.G. Fewston – Chapter One on Booksie.

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of Their Town, forthcoming in 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish, 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks, 2012; and,The Convalescent, 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer, 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World, 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless, 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home, 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy, 2014). Among many others, C.G.’s stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine, Driftwood Press,The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer, Moonlit Road,Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about C.G. and his writing at www.cgfewston.me

His new novel, A Time to Love in Tehran, will be published in 2015.

Rework by Jason Fried

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rework (2010) by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier is a motivational guide by the founders of 37signals (an extremely successful software company now in its 15th year: @ http://37signals.com/ ).

Rework is plastered with down-to-earth advice for anyone wanting to start a business, follow and realize a dream, or for those who desire to reinvigorate his/her company in a modern world fueled by fast-paced changes in technology, customer service and innovative thinking.
A few of 37signals’ products include Basecamp ( www.basecamphq.com ), Highrise ( www.highrisehq.com ), Backpack ( www.backpackit.com ), Campfire ( www.campfirenow.com ), Ta-da List ( www.tadalist.com ), Writeboard ( www.writeboard.com ), Getting Real ( www.gettingreal.37signals.com ), and Ruby on Rails ( www.rubyonrails.org ).

I recommend Writeboard for those writers and companies out there seeking a new collaborative writing tool, and also Getting Real for anyone, amateurs and professionals alike, who seek a faster and easier method for producing Web-based applications.

Rework is an easy yet inspiring read and can be finished in a few short evenings or one long afternoon. What is especially appealing is how the easy-going, no bullshit tone of the authors matches the large typeface, bold lettering, and corresponding images for each section. Readers will find themselves zipping through the book which seeks to empower, motivate and guide in an honest, casual manner.

In the section “Go to Sleep” the authors offer a few reasons why more sleep is beneficial to productivity and creativity. Many university students will be glad to read about this.

Some detrimental side-effects created by a lack of sleep among workers, the authors argue, are: Stubbornness, Lack of Creativity, Diminished Morale, and Irritability.

“These are just some of the costs you incur when not getting enough sleep. Yet some people still develop a masochistic sense of honor about sleep deprivation. They even brag about how tired they are. Don’t be impressed. It’ll come back to bite them in the ass” (p 121-122).

The advice is spot on. When I was in college, many-many years ago, I lived by Leonardo da Vinci’s work ethic: I’ll sleep when I’m dead. What I learned as I matured was that the less sleep I got the more I produced sloppier work and the less creative I became. Back then, I was demoralized because of shitty work, fewer new ideas, and the exhaustion that drenched my bones. The fact is the more sleep one gets the more the rested mind will be able to produce more efficient work. But as the axiom goes: Moderation in all things is necessary.

Meanwhile: “What do you call a generic pitch sent out to hundreds of strangers hoping that one will bite?” ask the authors, opening the section “Press Releases are Spam.”

“Spam. That’s what press releases are too: generic pitches for coverage sent out to hundreds of journalists you don’t know, hoping that one will write about you” (p 185).

What follows is some practical advice that should be a memo sent out to every writer attempting to be discovered (much like I am) or to every small business owner seeking to gain exposure through online platforms:

“Instead, call someone. Write a personal note. If you read a story about a similar company or product, contact the journalist who wrote it. Pitch her with some passion, some interest, some life. Do something meaningful. Be remarkable. Stand out. Be unforgettable. That’s how you’ll get the best coverage” (p 186).

Let’s face it. More people than ever are clamoring to get noticed, to rise to the top, to realize their dreams, and to be heard above all others in a sea of screaming voices. Not only is that hard to do, life is hard along the way as you are doing it.

“Make a Dent in the Universe” is one of the best sections in Rework. “To do great work,” write the authors, “you need to feel that you’re making a difference. That you’re putting a meaningful dent in the universe. That you’re part of something important” (p 31).

Most people I know want to do something important, to belong to something remarkable and share in the extraordinary. But most of the same people don’t know how to do just that and they go through life with their heads down, mouths shut and spirits dead.

Well, faced with such insurmountable and frightening odds, what can any of us do then?

“What you do is your legacy,” answer Jason and David. “Don’t sit around and wait for someone else to make the change you want to see. And don’t think it takes a huge team to make that difference either.

“Look at Craigslist, which demolished the traditional classified-ad business. With just a few dozen employees, the company generates tens of millions in revenue, has one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and disrupted the entire newspaper business” (p 31). If Craigslist can do it, so can you!

But let’s be honest with ourselves. Becoming a “unicorn” (a true-blue success story) in these saturated social-media conditions is enormously difficult. Not impossible. But extremely difficult. Especially if you’re like me and you don’t have a great body to flash your salivating followers. What is left is what my Granddaddy and my Father taught me: old-fashioned hard work.

In “The Myth of the Overnight Sensation” the writers tell it as it is: “You will not be a big hit right away. You will not get rich quick. You are not so special that everyone else will instantly pay attention. No one cares about you. At least not yet. Get used to it” (p 196).

Ouch! I know truth hurts but who ever thought it could ever hurt that much? And here I thought I was King of the World.

But wait! There’s more from Jason and David:

“Trade the dream of overnight success for slow, measured growth. It’s hard, but you have to be patient. You have to grind it out. You have to do it for a long time before the right people notice” (p 196).

I’ve been writing and publishing on my own for the past ten years. So where are these “people” anyway? I know I’m a turtle, and turtles like me do have a sense of patience and methodical habits of trudging up an endless mountain, but how much patience can one have before mastering “patience” and after one realizes that one cannot do anything without the help of others?

Regardless, decisions are not forever and one can learn to grow, “evolve” if you will.

“The decisions you make today don’t need to last forever…At this stage, it’s silly to worry about whether or not your concept will scale from five to five thousand people (or from a hundred thousand to 100 million people)…The ability to change course is one of the big advantages of being small” (p 251).

That’s all fine and dandy, you might be saying right about here. So where do we begin?

“Start making smaller to-do lists,” advise Jason and David. “Long lists collect dust….Long lists are guilt trips. The longer the list of unfinished items, the worse you feel about it…There’s a better way. Break that long list down into a bunch of smaller lists…Whenever you can, divide problems into smaller and smaller pieces until you’re able to deal with them completely and quickly…[and] prioritize visually. Put the most important thing at the top. When you’re done with that, the next thing on the list becomes the next most important thing. That way you’ll only have a single next most important thing to do at a time. And that’s enough” (p 128).

But the best advice, especially for corporations that treat people like insects or indentured servants (which for most Americans that is exactly what they are now), is the section called “They’re not Thirteen.” Jason and David, with their in-your-face, real-world commentary explain it as simple as possible, and yet no simpler:

“When you treat people like children, you get children’s work. Yet that’s exactly how a lot of companies and managers treat their employees. Employees need to ask permission before they can do anything. They need to get approval for every tiny expenditure. It’s surprising they don’t have to get a hall pass to go take a shit.

“When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of non-thinkers. You create a boss-versus-worker relationship that screams, ‘I don’t trust you’” (p 255).

Without a doubt Rework will get you to Rethink what corporate culture (which is failing among the American public and becoming demonized) has done and needs to do to be successful in an era where an alternate, parallel universe exists online and where a company can be successful and empower its employees to be the same. Rework is a strong recommend.

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of Their Town, forthcoming in 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish, 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks, 2012; and,The Convalescent, 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer, 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World, 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless, 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home, 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy, 2014). Among many others, C.G.’s stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine,Driftwood Press,The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer,Moonlit Road,Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about C.G. and his writing at www.cgfewston.me

His new novel, A Time to Love in Tehran, will be published in 2015.

View all my reviews

This is Yuanchao,

writer and law student at City University of Hong Kong

“Dating the Moon Through Music”

Two weeks ago, days before the approaching Mid-Autumn Festival, the full moon rising above, I go to the CityU Circle and drown myself into the ethereal Chinese Orchestra Concert. The moon (月) possesses various meanings in Chinese culture and enjoys an extraordinary status in the hearts of Chinese. The moon, as well as the orchestra itself, teaches me a vivid lesson of the diversity and spiritual essence underlying the traditional Chinese culture.

Yuanchao (left) with C.G. (right)

City University of Hong Kong Circle (CityU Circle)

The musical ensemble of Erhus strikes me most and engages me into a wonderland where nomads of northern China race horses over the great prairie in the Plateau of Inner-Mongolia. Erhus, nomads, grasslands reveal the diversity and whisper to me. Long ago, the ancient Chinese imported the portable Erhu from nomads and those skillful riders played the violin-like instruments on the backs of horses.

Now at the concert, the young musicians fiddle these bizarre violins, with horse heads and python skins covering eight-sided sound boxes. Deftly and dexterously, the musicians weave the hair of the bow between the strings while their wrists sway like swans twisting their elegant necks. Brisk tunes portray the scene of those minorities racing horses against each other during the celebration.

The music pulls me into my imagination where I travel over prairies and see young men and ladies riding their horses under the blue, blue sky with white, white clouds, flowing and chasing other clouds like the men chasing their future brides. At times, the riders make their mounts speed up, leaving the girls behind and letting them chase after, and sometimes the men slow to ride side by side. The youths laugh and smile at their beloveds with deep affection, dipped into love and happiness.

Now, having enjoyed the tune, my mind fills with numerous items: Erhu, Inner-Mongolia plateau, prairie, vigorous be-borne riders. I realize my country stands as a nation with diverse cultures for various kinds of civilizations incorporated, just like the one in Mongolia.

Apart from the piece of music performed by the Erhus, other songs in the concert also sound delicate; yet one thing really moves me. And that is the moon. After the performance I go out to the CityU Circle, raising my head and seeing the mostly full moon in the lonely dark dome of the sky above.

In Chinese traditional culture the full moon in Mid-Autumn represents unification and perfection, which means the family, and no matter how far the members travel away from home, will one day come together so that they can be as perfect as the moon. Yet I, an exile staying in this region, distant from my Beijing, cannot get together with the people I love and who love me. I am not full nor am I perfect. Not yet. When I was a child I could not perceive in Chinese civilization why people far from home acted sentimental and missed their families. But now I gradually understand the emotion and meaning inside the moon.

From this experience with the music and moon, I am for the first time aware of my culture and its diversity. As the music fades into memory and I leave the Chinese Orchestra Concert, I recall the famous poet Su Shi, who over a thousand years ago, expressed in an ancient poem, “The moon may be dim or bright, round or crescent shaped. This imperfection has been going on since the beginning of time. May we all be blessed with longevity, though thousands of miles apart, we are still able to share the beauty of the moon together.” Eventually, and one day for sure, I will reunite with my family.

Yuanchao (left) with C.G. (right)

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of Their Town, forthcoming in 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish, 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks, 2012; and,The Convalescent, 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer, 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World, 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless, 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home, 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy, 2014). Among many others, C.G.’s stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine,Driftwood Press,The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer,Moonlit Road,Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about C.G. and his writing at www.cgfewston.me

His new novel, A Time to Love in Tehran, will be published in 2015.

View all my reviews

It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be by Paul Arden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be (2003) by Paul Arden is a motivational guide to how to improve one’s own outlook in life and how, as a result, to become great. I actually bought this book because of its title (and what a great title it is) but this book is mainly focused on advertising and meant primarily for consultants working with clients through creative media, branding and slogans. But with most books, however, anyone at any time (even writers) can find something useful to take away and add value to his or her life. And so this is what I found:

As Paul admits, advertising is a form of selling and everyone on this planet is doing it at some point, even priests. He explains:

“You are hustling and selling or trying to make people buy something. Your services or your point of view.

“Tupperware parties, for example. They are selling.

“You clean your car to sell it, showing it to its best advantage.

“People even put bread in the oven to make their houses smell nice when they are trying to sell them.

“The way you dress when going for an interview or a party, or merely putting lipstick on. Aren’t you selling yourself?

“Your priest is selling. He is selling what he believes in. God.

“The point is we are all selling.

“We are all advertising.”

“It is part of life” (p 119).

Paul Arden

And he is right. Selling and advertising comes in all shapes and sizes and in all kinds of packages, not simply with fancy logos or witty slogans.

And Paul remembers one special photo shoot in New York many many years ago when he was working with a Vogue photographer on the Leni Riefenstahl’s Nuba woman brief (see below image) and what happened moments after:

“I remember the moment vividly.

“My feet seemed not to touch the pavement and I thought, ‘I am going to be fired for these pictures.’

“Would I rather be fired for having done them or not be fired having not done them?

“There was no doubt in my mind. I would rather be fired.

“Those few seconds on 74th Street were my greatest moment in advertising.

“When I got back and showed them to my partner he thought I was mad.

“Fortunately the client loved them. ‘This is art,’ he said.

“They won every award there was to be won” (p 116-117).

At times we just have to have faith in what we can’t see or even comprehend, regardless of what others do and say—which is, in effect, popular fashion. Certainly we don’t want to be laughed at, but if we never take risks, how can we expect to succeed? But as Paul, and many others before him, have mentioned, applause and accolades should not be the main aim for creative work.

“Awards are judged in committee by consensus of what is known,” writes Paul.

“In other words, what is in fashion.

“But originality can’t be fashionable, because it hasn’t yet had the approval of the committee.

“Do not try to follow fashion.

“Be true to your subject and you will be far more likely to create something that is timeless.

“That’s where the true art lies” (p 90).

But Paul has much more advice to share. Certainly we have to trust our gut at times in all things we do, have to deviate from the crowd and the standard norm, and to follow our dreams and passions, but we (that is, anyone who wants to excel in life) must get out there and socialize and spread the word about how awesome we are. For writers, this is especially hard to do since most writers are reclusive, pensive and solitary creatures. I know I have had to change, adapt, evolve if you will, and become more social and more outgoing and more enthusiastic about my own brand (see here at www.cgfewston.com ), and despite the fact that selling and advertising is happening at light speed thanks to the World Wide Web, it can be difficult to sell yourself. But here is why Paul considers it as an important step in achieving success:

“You are in a bar chatting, you talk yourself up and present your credentials, i.e. your business card.
“You will be accepted as an authority or practitioner of architecture.

“I, on the other hand, with my lack of social skills and reluctance to push myself forward, will be unnoticed. A nobody.

“Unfair as it may seem, this is the reality of life” (p 67).

Basically, as Paul admits, “How you perceive yourself is how others will see you” (p 64). And that is absolutely true. So value yourself. Believe in yourself. And know that you are everything you ever wanted to be and much much more.

But we have to take risks, step outside of our comfort zones, engage exciting but scary opportunities, and, above all, to accept failure as equally as we must accept success if the risk pays off.

Paul elaborates on why risks are a healthy part of being great:

“Risks are a measure of people. People who won’t take them are trying to preserve what they have.

“People who do take them often end up by having more.

“Some risks have a future, and some people call them wrong. But being right may be like walking backwards proving where you’ve been” (p 57).

Taking risks is all about seeking a better life and realizing dreams into reality. Not about failure. If you are afraid of taking risks, then you essentially have decided to willfully step back and bare the burdens of your own failures. Why not step up and take a risk? Who knows what good will come of it?

But if failure does happen, as it often does to those who are successful, we can only blame ourselves. We make the choice to act or to speak or to put ourselves on the line, so we must ultimately understand that there is no one to blame for our failures and mistakes but ourselves alone. But this is, nevertheless, how we grow, mature, become stronger and better individuals. The world will not give us a chance if we cannot first take the blame for our own shortcomings, and this, in a way, is a small step towards being successful.

“If you are involved in something that goes wrong,” Paul writes, “never blame others. Blame no one but yourself.
“If you have touched something, accept total responsibility for that piece of work. If you accept responsibility, you are in a position to do something about it” (p 28).

And that, my friend, is true, liberating freedom—the ability to do something, to be good, to be great.

“All of us want to be good at our jobs, but how good do we really want to be?

“Quite good.

“Good.

“Very good.

“The best in our field.

“Or the best in the world?

“Talent helps, but it won’t take you as far as ambition.

“Everybody wants to be good, but not many are prepared to make the sacrifices it takes to be great” (p 14).

Are you willing to endure the sacrifices to become great?

And that is the key to success no one ever tells you about—SACRIFICES, what you will have to lose or give up or let go along the way to achieving success and realizing your dreams. At the end of it, I hope and pray, you will not have lost your soul, or your true love, for that matter. Here’s wishing to a better tomorrow and a more loving and forgiving future—for each other and for ourselves.

It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be is a strong recommend because it is extremely motivational (especially if you are a consultant) and a very quick read (it took me about an hour from start to finish, but it may take a speed reader much less time).

So find yourself a copy this holiday season, lean back next to a warm fire, crack the spine or switch on the Kindle and be prepared to be inspired. After all, you are already awesome.

Paul Arden

 Keep reading and smiling…

“Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill

“There are no short cuts to any place worth going.” Beverly Sills

“Those who lack courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.” Albert Camus

“The superior man is distressed by his want (lack) of ability.” Confucius

“Some people take no mental exercise apart from jumping to conclusions.” Harold Acton

“What the mind can conceive, the mind can achieve.” Clement Stone

“Happiness is a singular incentive to mediocrity.” Michel Montaigne

“To become a champion, fight one more round.” James Corbett

“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.” Anais Nin

More quotes like the ones above can be found in Paul’s book on pages 122-123.

Here’s to the next round!

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of Their Town, forthcoming in 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish, 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks, 2012; and,The Convalescent, 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer, 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World, 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless, 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home, 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy, 2014). Among many others, C.G.’s stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine,Driftwood Press,The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer,Moonlit Road,Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about C.G. and his writing at www.cgfewston.me & www.cgfewston.com & www.cgfewston.org

His new novel, A TIME TO LOVE IN TEHRAN, will be published in 2015.

View all my reviews


Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture by Gregory Sholette
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2011) by Gregory Sholette is a collection of essays that distinguish the two classes of art: high/light versus low/dark. High art (light matter) is viewed as all art that is nationalized and well-known. Low art (dark matter) is considered all art that is out there but relatively unknown by the general public but known on a much smaller scale. Gregory explores these issues, as well as the differences between professionals and amateurs, and the impacts they have on ‘equal and just’ society throughout the book.

Gregory Sholette

In the United States there is a crises happening not only on the streets with police brutality but also in universities with the slashing of tenured jobs and the hiring of part-time professors. And add the minimum wage dispute for low-unlivable wages there’s no telling when the bottom will hit. When that day comes, Americans will wake up with eyes no longer disillusioned by their own greatness. No. The fact remains. The world is waking up and it isn’t happy.

“As never before,” writes Gregory, “producing, copying, re-mixing, printing, uploading, and distributing images and information has become (almost) everyone’s privilege, even their social responsibility. Digital technology also functions like a prosthetic memory permitting the excluded to document and narrate ephemeral, every day activities and overlooked forms of expression or resistance. As Boris Groys insists, no one sits in the audience any longer, everyone is on stage” (p 7).

And it is this very common denominator among the persecuted citizens that empower them to stand as one.

I believe the world needs art now more than ever. But it seems the elite and the precocious few fueled by greed think otherwise.

“Universities are slashing courses in Arts and Humanities,” writes Gregory, “now defined, under current funding regimes, as ‘of no financial value’—the only legitimate measure today” (p ix).

Sadly, this very ‘financial value’ has infested the very minds of the ones in charge of higher education and congress. How can one place such a value on art? On education? On humanity? Who is to sit back and judge intrinsic worth by placing a monetary figure on it?

Unfortunately this kind of narrow mindedness penetrates all walks of life in America. From fast food chains profiting billions, avoiding taxes, paying workers unlivable wages to publishers motivated more by profit rather than enhancing art to empower and enrich society the issue is profoundly evident to me: money is the sole logic behind why choices are being made, and this is no way to live or to evolve the human race. And the human race is evolving, waking up, taking to the streets now more than ever.

More Americans are starting to understand that the police force meant ‘to protect and to serve’ is simply militarized security for the one percent. The police are there to protect the wealthy and not to protect basic human rights. And this is the crises we see happening between high culture and low culture, and it certainly reflects in the choices produced in art.

“The critical moment is,” explains Gregory, “precisely, the moment of the splinter, the shattering. Critical is derived, of course, from crises. It is defined as a turning point, an interruption, a change in quality…Our book series would hope to address such a critical moment” (p ix).

And despite this book being three years old, the tensions unfolding throughout the United States, and the rest of the world like it is in Hong Kong, are clear. The human race is witnessing a turning point, a splintering if you will, of its own moral and spiritual evolution. And much of this can be seen through art and the treatment of both amateurs and professionals.

“And yet there is no material difference between an earnest amateur on the one hand, and a professional artist made invisible by her ‘failure’ within the art market on the other,” argues Gregory, “except perhaps that against all the odds she still hopes to be discovered” (p 3)?

Gregory continues with this discussion of the legitimation of how low culture through the use of the internet has invaded the sanctity of the controlled realms once possessed by the silent majority, namely high culture controlling and dictating what is to be called ‘art’:

“How would the art world manage its system of aesthetic valorization if the seemingly superfluous majority—those excluded as non-professionals as much as those destined to ‘fail’—simply gave up on its system of legitimation? Or if they found an alternative to it by creating a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network of support and direct sales bypassing art dealers, critics, galleries, and curators? Indeed, to some degree this has already begun to take shape via media applications of Web 2.0. What has not happened is any move towards re-distributing the cultural capital bottled up within the holding company known as high art” (p 3).

The internet, in essence, has removed the gatekeepers and no one is safe—as seen in recent cyber-attacks labeled as “organized” and “unprecedented”. The elite have lost their most prized luxury: anonymity. With anonymity comes distance, safety, invisibility and control and, thereby, the increase of power. This power ranges from the most mundane issues like employee morale to the issues of wages, brutality, excessive force, and this power even reaches into the hearts and minds of the citizens through art. If the people, and not the wealthy elites, are able to dictate the economy of art, and in effect morality and ethics, through ‘dark matter’, who is to say where humanity’s progress will end?

“All of these forms of dark matter play an essential role in the symbolic economy of art,” Gregory discusses. “Collectively, the amateur and the failed artist represent a vast flat field upon which a privileged few stand out in relief. The aim of this book is to raise an inevitable question: what if we turned this figure and ground relation inside out by imagining an art world unable to exclude the practices and practitioners it secretly depends upon? What then would become of its value structure and distribution power?” (p 3).

The issues we see throughout the streets of many American cities and throughout most companies and the control of art involves this very ‘distribution of power’. And the American people are getting fed up with a tipped scale that is constantly in favor of the ones with their finger immorally balancing the odds against the actual majority, the low culture represented in dark matter.

“Look again at the art world and the dark matter it occludes,” writes Gregory. “Few would deny that the lines separating ‘dark’ and ‘light’ creativity, amateur and professional, high from low have become arbitrary today, even from the standpoint of qualities such as talent, vision, and other similarly mystifying attributes typically assigned to high culture. What can be said of creative dark matter in general, therefore, is that either by choice or circumstance it displays a degree of autonomy from critical and economic structures of the art world by moving instead in-between its meshes” (p 4).

And that is exactly the kind of ‘pure and sacred’ autonomy that serves the genuineness of the Book Review Site CGFewston.me and will, God willingly, for decades to come. Here at this Site a reader who wants to know more about a book can do so without the political-and-media-trappings that often go into paid-by-the-publisher critical reviews. There’s no hype here. There’s only one humble man’s opinion and tastes molded to the likes of Tolstoy and his preferences for Art found in Tolstoy’s book: What is Art?

If high culture, as Tolstoy considered it, continued to be in control of Art and its future development, then society would ultimately suffer. And perhaps America in its poor modernistic attempts to produce “popular” Literature and Art has already begun to feel the weight of its own chimera—as in: the artistic sovereignty the upper-classes secretly claim to defend.

“This then,” writes Gregory, “is a book about the politics of invisibility that could only have been written at a moment when invisibility itself has emerged as a force to be contended with, or, conversely, a provocation to be selectively controlled. It is as much dedicated to those who reuse the capture of their invisibility, as it is to those whose very visibility has been and continues to be refused…And yet, as odd as a book about invisible artists and artwork may seem, my methods are less orthodox still” (p 5).

Dark Matter by Gregory Sholette is an enlightening read that has interconnected art in its varying forms through society and its ever changing patterns in the distribution of power, the wealth of the people and the economy, and the fundamental belief in the pursuit of happiness. Although this book is a dry, slow page turning text created in the trenches of academia, the world is certainly better for it having been published. A good recommend.

Keep reading and smiling…

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of Their Town, forthcoming in 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish, 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks, 2012; and,The Convalescent, 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer, 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World, 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless, 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home, 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy, 2014). Among many others, C.G.’s stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine,Driftwood Press,The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer,Moonlit Road,Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about C.G. and his writing at www.cgfewston.me & www.cgfewston.com & www.cgfewston.org

His new novel, A TIME TO LOVE IN TEHRAN, will be published in 2015.

C.G. and Shan,

in the old quarters of Macau – Oct. 17, 2014

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The princess runs away, fast as her feet can take her. Chasing her closely behind, a giant thumps his feet with a booming voice preceding his every step as he tries to catch her. Their distance keeps on narrowing, so the princess opens the bag she’s holding and throws a handful of salt at the giant. Soon, a deep blue sea separates the two. Beyond the sound of crashing waves, a familiar voice calls my name.

I lifted my head from the book. The voice turned out to be my primary school teacher’s, and I spent the rest of that period standing in front of the classroom.

If I could only choose one word to describe my childhood, I wouldn’t even have to think: fantasy. My kindergarten teachers would complain that I did not pay enough attention in class. I spent almost every waking moment in the world of words – where letters build the bricks of the castle and imagination breathes life into the people trapped inside the books.

But I couldn’t help it. The ordinary world was just too dull and paled in comparison with what my brain thought it could be.

By the end of my junior high school, I started to feel restless. I felt that something was missing, something that even a full mark can’t replace. But I shushed it away and tried focusing on my exams instead.

It was not until the eleventh grade I finally realized what the itch was. School alone just wasn’t enough. What would be the best possible result after I study day and night? I’d ace all my exams. But after I got stellar marks, then what? Sure, it’d come in handy when applying to universities, but what would make me stand out among hundreds of stellar-marked students from other high schools?

One day, it suddenly hit me. Apparently, what I wanted to do had been staring me in the face the whole time: film.

Today, I am no longer the kid whom buries her head in books and daydreams the whole time. But I never really left my childhood’s imaginary world. That’s why, naturally, film draws my attention. That’s also why I decided to join my high school’s Cinematography Club.

In Cinematography Club, I learn that making film is anything but glamorous. Making film is a labor. A single thirty-seconds take can take hours to complete. There are too many parties involved: the actors, the director, the cameramen, and the producer to mention a few. For example, a mistake made solely by the actor will result in the whole film crew having to reshoot the scene all over again.

As tiring and exhausting it is, that’s part of what makes film special. It’s a communal activity that puts people from different backgrounds together – nobody can make a film by himself or herself.

But the main reason why I want to go into film is because I’m forever indebted to film. Film has helped me through my ups and downs in life; it gives me strength and inspiration when I felt like giving up. After experiencing the power of film by myself, I found my dream. I want to make films that can open up new perspectives and give people strength, just like how film gives strength to me.

Majoring in Bachelor of Arts will give me the chance to explore cinematography in depth – a chance that no other major can offer. By digging deeper into the world of filmmaking, I hope I can expand my knowledge and expertise and as a result, be able to make engaging and meaningful films. I know that the road ahead would be rough and unfamiliar. Working in the film industry also doesn’t offer much in terms of personal finance and job security, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Kristiana is marked below

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of Their Town, forthcoming in 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish, 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks, 2012; and,The Convalescent, 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer, 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World, 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless, 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home, 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy, 2014). Among many others, C.G.’s stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine,Driftwood Press,The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer,Moonlit Road,Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about C.G. and his writing at www.cgfewston.me & www.cgfewston.com & www.cgfewston.org

His new novel, A TIME TO LOVE IN TEHRAN, will be published in 2015.

C.G. and Shan,

in the old quarters of Macau – Oct. 17, 2014

View all my reviews

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: AND How to Get What You Want in Your Relationships: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships by John Gray
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex (1992) by John Gray, Ph.D is a remarkable, eye-opening book that dispels any belief that men and women are in fact the same.

As it comes to my attention, women and men should not be classified as belonging to the same ‘human race’, per se, but a distinct and separate division of the species itself. Doctor Gray admits to calling men ‘Martians’ and women ‘Venusians’ and this, I find, sounds like a far better label.

Dr. John Gray

Martians and Venusians, however, do not have to primarily include men as Martians and women as Venusians, but rather any man or woman who speaks as a typical man would be classified as a Martian and any man or woman who speaks as a typical woman would be classified as a Venusian. The main consideration to reflect upon is that Martians and Venusians, albeit speaking English or some other common human tongue, are in fact not speaking the same ‘inner language’ and this, as we shall see, leads to so many problems in relationships.

“Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” writes Dr. Gray, “is a manual for loving relationships. It reveals how men and women differ in all areas of their lives. Not only do men and women communicate differently but they think, feel, perceive, react, respond, love, need, and appreciate differently. They almost seem to be from different planets, speaking different languages and needing different nourishment…Problems are inevitable. But these problems either can be sources of resentment and rejection or can be opportunities for deepening intimacy and increasing love, caring, and trust…It is never too late to increase the love in your life. You only need to learn a new way” (p xxx-xxi-xxxiii).

 C.G. & Shan in Taiwan, Oct. 2014

The potential here for evolving one’s love life through troublesome times is tremendous when both parties understand what is actually going on within the other rather than staying stuck in their own inner language, interpreting actions and events in their own inner language and jumping to conclusions based on their own rejections, fears and pain rather than seeking to explore their partner’s intentions and actions based on their partner’s inner language, whether they are Martian or Venusian.

What happens during problematic times, as an illustration, is that a Venusian will watch the actions of her partner and interpret these signs as a Venusian rather than as a Martian. And this leads to confusion, fear and ultimately difficulties in the relationship, or in its most extreme case a childish and cruel insecurity rears its head to break a loving relationship off without further communication and commit to a ‘No Contact Rule’, often found as a source of incorrect healing on the internet. Healing comes through communication and discussing problems, not hiding them away and locking those pains, fears and rejections deep down for another day so that they can only return to do more harm than good. Nevertheless, emotions must be handled in some form or another.

For example, Martians and Venusians deal with emotions very differently. When Martians become too intimate and too emotional they feel an instinctual urge to draw back and rest inside their ‘cave’ so they can make sense of these emotions. Much of this has to do with the fact that Martians, while intimate, will have lower testosterone levels and higher oxytocin levels which leads to this momentary feeling of inner depletion. Martians must pull away so they can restore their testosterone levels in order to give their partners more intimacy.

C.G. and Shan in Taiwan, Oct. 2014

“While Martians tend to pull away and silently think about what’s bothering them,” explains Dr. Gray, “Venusians feel an instinctive need to talk about what’s bothering them…Men are motivated when they feel needed while women are motivated when they feel cherished…A man gets close but then inevitably needs to pull away. Women will learn how to support this pulling-away process so he will spring back to her like a rubber band. Women also will learn the best times for having intimate conversations with a man…Men need a kind of love that is trusting, accepting, and appreciative. Women primarily need a kind of love that is caring, understanding, and respectful” (p 3-4).

What happens more times than not in a loving relationship, a man will pull away to get his testosterone back in order to give more intimacy with his partner, while the partner incorrectly interprets this as a sign of rejection, and when the man returns with high testosterone and ready for intimate moments with the one he loves, the woman rejects her partner over false assumptions and thoughts that will forever remain only in her head and not in the truth of a man’s heart.

To explain these ‘pulling away moments’ one might relate to a woman’s ‘time of the month’. Women go through a menstrual cycle each month and most men are aware of this and ignore crude outbursts from their female partners. Women, however, are often ignorant of men who become too intimate and have a similar experience to the menstrual cycle that may be referred to as a man’s ‘intimate cycle’, which Dr. Gray points out, happens roughly the same length of time as a woman’s cycle. When a man goes through this cycle he, like his partner, is unaware of it, and the woman may be unforgiving to his outbursts (as say a man would be more forgiving during her ‘period’) and the woman becomes less understanding. In earnest, both men and women need to better educate themselves to these masculine and feminine cycles that both partners experience as human beings and how both cycles can affect their mood swings, and possibly their relationship and future.

“A rubber band is the perfect metaphor to understand the male intimacy cycle,” writes Dr. Gray. “This cycle involves getting close, pulling away, and then getting close again. Most women are surprised to realize that even when a man loves a woman, periodically he needs to pull away before he can get closer. Men instinctively feel this urge to pull away. It is not a decision or choice. It just happens. It is neither his fault nor her fault. It is a natural cycle” (p 99).

I am a Martian in every molecule of my being and I am also thirty-five years-old, and I have never known of this intimacy cycle until I read this book, and I am so relieved to finally have discovered a new part of my manhood. Unfortunately, I experienced these unexplained shifts in mood as part of my intimacy cycle, while being madly in love, and have at times been rejected by female partners who were also uneducated and unaware of these natural cycles, and it only creates a black hole where love once glowed bright. I never knew why this happened until now.

“Very few people, indeed,” reflects Dr. Gray, “are able to grow in love. Yet, it does happen. When men and women are able to respect and accept their differences then love has a chance to blossom” (p 7).

Other differences between Venusians and Martians abound. Martians may value competency, achievement, power while Venusians value beauty, relationships, communication and love (p 9, 11). A Martian is taught to handle his problems on his own and rarely seeks out advice, whereas Venusians are “more concerned with living together in harmony, community, and loving cooperation” so they seek to explore their problems with other Venusians in order to “share their personal feelings,” and this is seen as being far more important “than achieving goals and success” (p 10,12).

C.G. and Shan in Taiwan, Oct. 2014

Martians and Venusians are not the same and do not communicate in the same way or for the same reasons. These two styles of communication, however, can be learned by both Martians and Venusians, which can lead into greater awareness, greater understanding, and greater love in a relationship.

“Men need to remember that women talk about problems to get close,” writes Dr. Gray, “and not necessarily to get solutions…You see, Venusians never offer solutions when someone is talking. A way of honoring another Venusian is to listen patiently with empathy, seeking truly to understand the other’s feelings” (p 16-17).

As practice, I have been ease-dropping onto couples in cafes and have also practiced listening to my female colleagues and I can now see exactly what Dr. Gray is referring to. In the past, when a woman spoke, I often waited to hear the problem (as a good little Martian) and to offer my solutions. Now, however, I don’t really listen as a Martian but as a Venusian, and when my inner thoughts suggest a solution, I ignore saying anything and instead seek to explore the woman’s feelings. When I did this, I found that the woman explored her own feelings related to the problem, moved to the next set of problems, and eventually came to her own solutions as she spoke. After a time, I began to notice that she noticed that we had made a connection, that this Venusian recognized that a Martian had actually spoken her language.

As a Martian to another Martian I do not call this really “listening” as when a Venusian asks you (as both of you are seated on the sofa), “Are you listening to me?” And you repeat verbatim to what she said from the recorder locked away in your Martian brain.

Rather “listening” is instead, for a Martian, helping the Venusian to explore her emotions, explore her problems, explore her situation so that she can become relaxed and find her own answers, and this is one of the greatest kinds of attention a Martian can pay to a Venusian. So when a Venusian asks, “Are you listening to me?” you can interpret this as, “Why aren’t you helping me to explore my problems, my fears, my insecurities, my emotions so that I can feel better when I am around you?” When a Martian asks, “Are you listening to me?” he simply means: “Did you hear what I just said?”

“He thinks he has heard her if he can repeat what she has said,” Dr. Gray explains. “A translation of a woman saying ‘I don’t feel heard’ so that a man could correctly interpret it is: ‘I feel as though you don’t fully understand what I really mean to say or care about how I feel. Would you show me that you are interested in what I have to say?’” (p 63)

These are just some of the communication differences shared between Martians and Venusians. Likewise, they also handle stress very very differently.

“One of the biggest differences between men and women is how they cope with stress,” explains Dr. Gray. “Men become increasingly focused and withdrawn while women become increasingly overwhelmed and emotionally involved…He feels better by solving problems while she feels better by talking about problems” (p 25). And if a Martian and Venusian are unaware of how they each need to communicate, problems in the relationship are sure to rise.

C.G. and Shan in Taiwan, Oct. 2014

In addition, if a man is stressful and trying to solve a problem at work or at home, “he becomes so focused on solving this one problem that he temporarily loses awareness of everything else [while] other problems and responsibilities fade into the background [and] at such times, he becomes increasingly distant, forgetful, unresponsive, and preoccupied in his relationships…At such times he is incapable of giving a woman the attention and feeling she normally receives and certainly deserves. His mind is preoccupied, and he is powerless to release it” (p 28).

The sad thing about this is if the Venusian partner doesn’t understand that her favorite Martian is going through something stressful and interprets (in her own inner language) this behavior as being rejecting and cold, when in fact her Martian loves her very very much. At these times, both partners need to understand that they are not the same, they do not feel in the same ways, they do not handle stress in the same ways, and they do not—I repeat, do not—communicate in the same ways.

“When a man is stuck in his cave,” Dr. Gray explains, “he is powerless to give his partner the quality attention she deserves. It is hard for her to be accepting of him at these times because she doesn’t know how stressed he is. If he were to come home and talk about all his problems, then she could be more compassionate. Instead he doesn’t talk about his problems, and she feels he is ignoring her. She can tell he is upset but mistakenly assumes he doesn’t care about her because he isn’t talking” (p 29).

What happens next is only heartbreak for both partners because the Venusian interprets her favorite Martian’s actions in the wrong manner because “ever since she was a little girl this type of intimacy was her dream [and] his pulling away was a tremendous shock to her. To the vulnerable little girl within her it was an experience of giving candy to a baby and then taking it away. She became very upset” (p 132).

Now most women, Martians might argue, should be mature, secure, and trusting in a loving relationship. Sadly, Martians would be wrong. Venusians need communication and without that they become overly insecure and mistrustful and hurt.

Venusians find peace and understanding and true love when they “finally understood that a Martian going into his cave was not a sign that he didn’t love her as much [and] they learned to be more accepting of him at these times because he was experiencing a lot of stress” (p 38-39).

I recently experienced this with the woman I love. I was very stressed at work, my testosterone running on empty (because of the overly intimate moments I felt for her), and would come to her unable to speak about my problems because I was raised to keep silent and handle my own problems myself. In other words, my mind retreated into its cave. I was taught we had problems; why burden others with yours? So I felt it strange (until after reading this book) to listen to a woman’s problems. I thought if she talked about her problems then she needed help resolving her issues. Now I know it is her way of getting close to her man. And a man, like me, should not feel ashamed to discuss openly issues that are bothering me with the woman I love. This form of open communication deepens bonds and makes the hearts grow fonder. But how many men actually know to do this?

A Venusian, on the other hand, deals with stress very differently. Women need to discuss openly about their problems in order to deal with their issues. I think most Martians would agree that Venusians need a “mind dump” in order to feel better.

“By talking about all possible problems without focusing on problem solving she feels better,” explains Dr. Gray. “Through exploring her feelings in this process she gains a greater awareness of what is really bothering her, and then suddenly she is no longer so overwhelmed…The more talk and exploration, the better they feel. This is the way women operate. To expect otherwise is to deny a woman her sense of self…Gradually, if she feels she is being heard, her stress disappears” (p 33).

Whether you are in a relationship, getting over one, or trying to start a new one, there is much more Dr. Gray can teach you about yourself, about relationships and about your partner, so I strongly recommend, if you haven’t already, to read this book as soon as possible. And if you have read it, I recommend to go back and reread it again in order to continually remind yourself that men and women do not communicate or behave in the same manner and fashion.

And, as Dr. Gray will close us out, remember: “Next time you are frustrated with the opposite sex, remember men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Even if you don’t remember anything else from this book, remembering that we are supposed to be different will help you to be more loving. By gradually releasing your judgments and blame and persistently asking for what you want, you can create the loving relationships you want, need, and deserve” (p 323).

And with that I leave you until next time.

I wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and pray that you find and cherish love and remember to be a bit more forgiving this New Year.

Keep reading and smiling…

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of Their Town, forthcoming in 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish, 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks, 2012; and,The Convalescent, 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer, 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World, 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless, 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home, 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy, 2014). Among many others, C.G.’s stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine,Driftwood Press,The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer,Moonlit Road,Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about C.G. and his writing at www.cgfewston.me & www.cgfewston.com & www.cgfewston.org

His new novel, A TIME TO LOVE IN TEHRAN, will be published in 2015.

C.G. and Shan,

in the old quarters of Macau – Oct. 17, 2014

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Notes from the Universe: New Perspectives from an Old Friend by Mike Dooley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Notes from the Universe: New Perspectives from an Old Friend (2003) by Mike Dooley is one of those rare books that uplifts and propels you through a new day with such insight that it will leave you with a secret knowledge that, yes, the Universe does give a damn about you.

Mike Dooley

And instead of me analyzing or interpreting what’s in this little book that can be read in an afternoon or two, or a page a day for 218 days, I will just share with you what resonated with me.

So let’s begin and open ourselves up to a Universe much older and much wiser than we could ever imagine being.

Oh, I hear a knock at the door. Excuse me while I get that.

Why I’ll be… it’s the Universe. Welcome!

“That’s right. This is a dream.

“You’re still asleep. Any minute now, an elephant might appear behind you wearing a pink tutu and tennis shoes. Or maybe the phone will ring, and it’ll be Abraham Lincoln to ask why you’re late for the ball. Or perhaps Oprah is down the hall, live audience in tow, about to introduce you as her new favorite author. Anything can happen in a dream, anything, without regard to the past, without regard to logic, and you never have to figure out the ‘hows.’

“Learn from your dreams, because the stuff of time and space is no different. Forget your past. Pitch the logic. And drop the cursed hows.

“Tallyho, the Universe. PS-Cute whiskers” (p 185).

“Actually, it’s pretty simple. You have one real choice: To do your best, with what you have, from where you are. Everything else is just stalling” (p 80).

“Do you know why you are you?

“Because no one else could be” (p 177).

“Don’t you see these are the days, right now, mid-adventure, that will mean the most to you once your dreams come true? Enjoy” (p 149).

“Shhhhh…The secret to living the life of your dreams is to start living the life of your dreams, at once, to any degree that you possibly can” (p 61).

“Don’t just see the magic, engage it! Challenge it! Dare it! Dream big, with every expectation that your dreams will manifest.

“Demand that they come true! You’re not beholden to life. Life is beholden to you. You are its reason for being. You came first” (p 104).

“It’s as if the Universe works backwards, too. You think of the end result, what you want to happen in your life, and then the Universe works backward, aligning your dreamed-of life with where you are today, stringing together people, places and events, for the ‘impossible’ to become possible. This is how life works. Trust the Universe, it knows how. Don’t tie its hands with logic, fear, or limiting beliefs” (p 157).

“Your supply is the Universe, and its ways are infinite” (p 130).

“Someone once said, ‘No pain, no gain.’

“And so it became their reality. Bummer, huh?” (p 126).

“Never underestimate the Universe” (p 72).

“No matter how great the temptation…(I’m talking about the temptation you’re feeling right this very second), no matter how great… STOP seeing yourself as just human! You are pure energy, with an infinite reach” (p 86).

“Here’s a snippet of advice that come from an as yet undiscovered manuscript buried deep in some Pyrenees mountain cave…

“‘Choose feelings over logic, adventure over perfection, here over there, now over then, and always love, love, love.’

“It also said ‘you rock,’ but you never would have believed that” (p 210).

“If you knew for certain that very, very soon all your dreams would be coming true, what would you do today to prepare the way? (Do it.)

“How might you celebrate? (Do this, too.)

“Who would you tell? (Write them a brief note, now; you don’t have to mail it yet.)

“What thoughts of gratitude would you have? (Express them.)

“And finally, who would you help to ‘achieve,’ as you have achieved? (Help them)” (p 77).

“Whosever may torment you, harass you, confound you, or upset you is a teacher. Not because they’re wise, but because you seek to become so” (p 78).

“Do you know what happens just before something really incredible takes place? Something mind-blowing? Just before a really huge dream comes true?

“Nothing. Nothing happens. At least not in the physical world.

“So if, perchance, right now, it appears that absolutely nothing is happening in your life…consider it a sign” (p 140).

“Of course, ‘Here & Now’ is what really matters, but people will be people, so…given that you’re a FOREVER BEING, I do hope you’re spending as much time looking forward as you are looking back. Because really, forever means you have quite a lot to look forward to” (p 209).

“And on Friday, the Universe said, ‘Yo! Ho! Ho! It’s time to have fun!’

“Whereupon it invented imagination, and there was a huge gasp among the angels. For it was clear that the reins of power in Time and Space had been passed to those so blessed, and that they would be left to discover this for themselves.

“And it was good. Happy Anniversary! PS-And as the angels quickly gathered, there, in line, stood you” (p 206).

“When you understand someone, truly understand someone, no matter who they are, you cannot help but love ‘em, even though you might not always love what they do.

“You knew that. Okay. Just as true is that for anyone you feel less than love for, no matter who they are, it’s because you do not truly understand them.

“(No, you don’t have to like what they do either, nor are you ‘supposed’ to stay with them. You get to decide those things)” (p 129).

“Anger closes the mind and cools the heart at a time when both are needed most” (p 183).

“You must live the truths you discover, you must break your old rules, defy logic, be the change. Dig, write the check, and drink eternally, one little step after another.

“I’m sorry, but there’s no other way. Tallyho, the Universe. PS-Of course, you can ask for help” (p 170).

“No one in your shoes could have done better than you’ve done, with where you began, what you had, and all you’ve been through. No one. Aren’t you glad it wasn’t easier?” (p 151)

“How much longer before you revel in the awareness that you are enough, that you’ve done enough, and that you’re now worthy of your heart’s greatest desires?

“What has to happen for you to give this to yourself?

“No biggie. Just wondering. Take your time” (p 148).

“Oh dear, never ask how. Never think about how; let go of the hows. If you wonder about how, it means your consciousness is not dwelling in spirit, it means you’re trying to manipulate matter, and it means you’re gonna be searching for a long, long, long, long time.

“Steer clear of the hows, dear heart, and simply dwell on the end result. Got it?” (p 118)

“For as long as you are capable of anger, there are lessons to learn” (p 114).

“It all goes by so fast, doesn’t it? One minute you’re here, and the next you’re gone.

“So really, you’ve got nothing to lose, have you? Nothing! You’re gonna make it ‘home’ anyway. You’re gonna be exalted, and it’s gonna be so glorious, happy, and easy.

“Then, after a careful life review, you’re gonna slap your hand on your celestial forehead, jump up and down with uproarious laughter, and say, ‘Dang, my thoughts really did become the things and events of my life. That little book was right. And as exalted as I am here, I was there. And as easy as it is here, so could it have been there! I wanna play again, I wanna go back. This time I promise not to forget. I promise I’ll believe in my dreams and myself. I’ll never let go. I’ll never give up. I’ll keep the faith. Really I will” (p 79).

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to all of you…

Keep reading and smiling…

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of Their Town, forthcoming in 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish, 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks, 2012; and,The Convalescent, 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer, 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World, 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless, 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home, 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy, 2014). Among many others, C.G.’s stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine,Driftwood Press,The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer,Moonlit Road,Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about C.G. and his writing at www.cgfewston.me & www.cgfewston.com & www.cgfewston.org

His new novel, A TIME TO LOVE IN TEHRAN, will be published in 2015.

“Love in Hong Kong”

CG and Shan in Hong Kong, Oct. 26, 2014

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If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules by Cherie Carter-Scott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If Life is a Game, These are the Rules (1998) by Chérie Carter-Scott was first introduced as “Ten Rules for Being Human” in Chicken Soup for the Soul and has since spread its wisdom across the globe. The sage-like advice at times is simple and filled with common sense while at other times it penetrates deep into the soul of the human being capable of mindless mistakes or proactive change.

Chérie Carter-Scott 

“While reading this book,” writes Chérie, “you will begin to see your life from a whole new perspective. If you embrace the principles in this book, I promise you that your life will magically transform, and that you will learn the secrets to manifesting your heart’s desire” (p xiii-xiv).

Chérie continues to explain that these “rules” are more advice than mandates and are in no way a cure-all or an anodyne for life.

“The Ten Rules for Being Human are not magic,” explains Chérie, “nor do they promise ten easy steps to serenity. They offer no quick fix for emotional or spiritual ailments, and they are not fast-track secrets to enlightenment. Their only purpose is to give you a road map to follow as you travel your path of spiritual growth” (p 6).

And a road map they do provide for those dark nights and rainy days where the universe has turned your world upside down and seems to laugh at you for your mistakes. Sometimes we seek answers where none can be found, and sometimes we find answers without ever having to seek them.

Below is a quick overview of the first three rules for being human. Let’s begin.

Rule One: “You Will Receive a Body: You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth” (p 7).

“The moment you arrived here on this Earth,” writes Chérie, “you were given a body in which to house your spiritual essence. The real ‘you’ is stored inside this body—all hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, expectations, and beliefs that make you the unique human that you are. Though you will travel through your entire lifetime together, you and your body will always remain two separate and distinct entities” (p 7).

This first rule surprised me to say the least because in fact most people do forget that the body is but a bridge from the seen world to the unseen. Inside our bodies we hold all the power of the universe. If God is in fact “love,” and our bodies in fact can create “love,” then are we not creators of God? Or if not creators, then we are at the very least responsible for sharing God/Love with the rest of the world. Just as our bodies are capable of terrific evil, so our bodies are filled with the possibilities of wonderful good.

“Respect carries reciprocal energy,” explains Chérie. “Your body will honor you when you honor it. Treat your body as a structure worthy of respect and it will respond in kind” (p 18).

This can be taken in many ways, but for the most part it stands true. Exercise and good health are the cornerstone to a happy, successful life. Far too often we fail to honor our bodies, the very thing that houses the soul, a spirit capable of great compassion, integrity, sincerity, kindness, joy, and above all, love.

Rule Two: “You will be Presented with Lessons: You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called ‘life.’ Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum” (p 24).

What is fascinating about this rule is that it reminds us to remember that with the good times and the bad times there are lessons to be learned. This actually reminds me of a story about Ryan.

Once there was a young man named Ryan who fell deeply and madly in love with a young woman named Sharon. For three months they had a tremendous time getting to know each other until Ryan grew distant and ended up accidentally hurting Sharon by sending an all-too honest, yet hurtful, email. Sharon interpreted the email incorrectly and Ryan suffered the cruel hand of fate when Sharon pulled away and both forever lost contact. Ryan, in essence, had to learn a lesson in life, about himself, about commitment, about the opposite sex, and about how to deal with his own emotions. As Ryan found out, some lessons are like being branded with a hot iron. But for him it was necessary.

“Every person has his or her own purpose and distinct path,” explains Chérie, “unique and separate from anyone else’s. As you travel your life path, you will be presented with numerous lessons that you will need to learn in order to fulfill that purpose. The lessons you are presented with are specific to you; learning these lessons is the key to discovering and fulfilling the meaning and relevance of your own life.

“Once you have learned the basic lessons taught to you by your own body, you are ready for a more advanced teacher: the universe” (p 24-25).

Long ago I walked away from an ordinary life working ten hours a day in Capital One Bank to travel and explore the world and find my destiny. In truth, I walked away just two years before the American economy collapsed, and everyone at the bank knew it was going to happen. From then on I began listening to the Universe and trusting myself in ways I never thought possible, and it led me down some amazing roads of self-discovery and fulfilment. Most of my dreams have come true, but there are a few more still waiting. But, alas, I follow the Universe and trust these dreams will one day come true as well.

“In the state of grace,” writes Chérie, “you trust in yourself and the universe. You can celebrate other people’s blessings, knowing that their gifts are right and appropriate for them and that the universe has your gift right around the corner” (p 36).

Celebrate life by celebrating each other, and then perhaps positive emotions can spread through the world and overpower those negative emotions like greed, jealousy and anger.

And yes, I do hope that one special gift is waiting “around the corner,” as do we all.

Rule Three: “There are no Mistakes, Only Lessons: Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials and errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work” (p 37).

We must remember that no one is perfect, and that we are all a work in progress. We have our good days and we have our bad days. The people we surround ourselves with should know that we are not perfect, that we can be less than perfect, that some days are better than others, that sometimes we need to vent and get angry at ourselves and the world, and that other days we celebrate life in all its wonderment. No. We are not perfect creatures. We make mistakes. We can only hope that our loved ones can understand this. And if they cannot, we too must remember that they are not perfect and forgive them just as much as we are in need of forgiveness. Such is the truth of our own imperfections.

“Rather than viewing your own mistakes as failures and others’ mistakes as slights,” explains Chérie, “you can view them as opportunities to learn. As Emerson said, ‘Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.’ Every situation which you do not live up to your own expectations is an opportunity to learn something important about your own thoughts and behaviors…

“When you consider the hardships of life—the disappointments, hurts, losses, illnesses, all the tragedies you may suffer—and shift your perception to see them as opportunities for learning and growth, you become empowered. You can take charge of your life and rise to its challenge, instead of feeling defeated, victimized, or cast adrift” (p 38).

Take charge of your own mistakes and imperfections and begin to see them as opportunities to grow in ways you never thought possible. God knows I have. And you will, in the end, be the better person for it.

“The secret to learning to open your heart is the willingness to connect to your essence and the essence of the person you are judging. From there, the magic of compassion opens limitless doors to human connection” (p 43).

Far too often I come across people who would rather hold on to resentments, hate and scorn, rather than trying to hear the other person out without judgment and try and reconcile differences based on truth rather than assumptions and false pretenses and lies. Compassion means to open ourselves up so that we might be able to forgive and understand what is going on in the people and world around us. But some people enjoy holding on to resentment and remain silent as if it holds some sort of power over others.

In true sadness, silence is only silence. There is no power there. Many people I have met in this world enjoy playing “power games,” and these games I simply walk away from. I have no desire to play games with the hearts and minds of the people of this world. I am not perfect. I understand this. But when I am imperfect and I make a mistake, I admit as much and seek reconcilement, to seek forgiveness and understanding, to seek love. I watch people, especially those of family and friends and lovers who once confess their great love and honor to you, only to turn into a complete stranger…and it’s all because of those “power games” of the spirit, of the heart and mind men and women like to play. There is no power in these games because in the end everyone gets hurt. I don’t know. I just could never play these kinds of games very well, nor do I wish ever to do so.

“If you choose compassion, you need to move the judgment from its position in your mind down into the emotional realm of your heart. It is there that you can try on what it would feel like to be that person you are judging and imagine putting yourself in her reality. This will connect you to her essence and evaporate the judgment encrusted around your heart” (44).

Chérie goes on to tell a story of how Nicki was molested as a child by a much older man and fifteen years later while Nicki was working as social worker, she came across the same sex offender who was still in need of rehabilitation. One can only imagine her horror and pain to have to relive such horrific memories when faced with the past and the very man still abusing children. But the fact remained: Nicki knew that this man was “deeply troubled and needed to be helped,” so she forgave him and felt compassion in order to try and help this dreadful soul and stop the cycle of abuse he inflicted on small children (p 44-45).

“By connecting to her essence, she allowed herself to imagine the pain this man must have been in that caused him to behave the way he did; it was by imagining herself in his reality that she was able to release her judgments and move into compassion” (45).

Compassion. Now isn’t that the word for today.

“When your external actions reflect your internal code,” writes Chérie, “you are in alignment with your morality. This is how an individual gains integrity” (52).

And as far as I’m concerned, integrity is missing in many parts of the world and in many dark places that fill the hearts, the minds and spirits of men and women and children. Integrity is a valuable gift to yourself and should never be taken lightly, and from there character is born. Now that’s a lasting gift, to yourself and to the world.

If Life is a Game, These are the Rules by Chérie Carter-Scott is a strong recommend. Go out and pick up a copy today, for you and for a friend.

Keep reading and smiling…

C.G. Fewston is an international writer/university professor who currently holds a post as Visiting Fellow in the English department at City University of Hong Kong. Fewston earned an M.A. in Literature with honors from Stony Brook University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he had the chance to work with wonderful and talented novelists like Richard Adams Carey (author of Their Town, forthcoming in 2015; and, The Philosopher Fish, 2006) and Jessica Anthony (author of Chopsticks, 2012; and,The Convalescent, 2010) as well as New York Times Best-Selling novelists Matt Bondurant (author of The Night Swimmer, 2012; and, The Wettest County in the World, 2009, made famous in the movie Lawless, 2012) and Wiley Cash (author of A Land More Kind Than Home, 2013; and, This Dark Road to Mercy, 2014). Among many others, C.G.’s stories, photographs and essays have appeared in Bohemia, Ginosko Literary Journal, Tendril Literary Magazine,Driftwood Press,The Missing Slate, Foliate Oak Magazine, The Writer’s Drawer,Moonlit Road,Nature Writing, and Travelmag: The Independent Spirit; and for several years he was a contributor to Vietnam’s national premier English newspaper, Tuoi Tre, ”The Youth Newspaper.” You can read more about C.G. and his writing at www.cgfewston.me & www.cgfewston.com & www.cgfewston.org

His new novel, A TIME TO LOVE IN TEHRAN, will be published in 2015.

“Love in Hong Kong”

C.G. and Shan in Hong Kong, Oct. 26, 2014

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