PREFACE
OF “LIKE THE FLOWING RIVER”- PAULO COELHO
When I was
fifteen, I said to my mother: ‘I’ve discovered my vocation. I want to be a
writer.’
‘My dear,’
she replied sadly,’your father is an engineer. He’s a logical, reasonable man
with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be
a writer?’
‘Being
someone who writes books.’
‘Your uncle
Haroldo, who is a doctor, also writes books, and has even published some. If you
study engineering, you can always write in your spare time.’
‘No,Mama. I want
to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books.’
‘But have
you ever met a writer? Have you ever seen a writer?’
‘Never. Only
in photographs.’
‘So how can
you possibly want to be a writer if you don’t really know what it means?’
In order to
answer my mother’s question, I decided to do some research. This is what I learned
about what being a writer meant in the early 1960s:
a.) A writer always wears glasses and
never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and other
half depressed. His spends most of his life in bars. His says very ’deep’
things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates
the one he has just published.
b.) A writer has a duty and an obligation
never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has
been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would
mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and
rewrites each sentences many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made
up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are
another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
c.) Only other writers can understand
what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers,
because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of
literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the
prize of ‘most complicated book’: the one who wins will be the who has
succeeded in being the most difficult to read.
d.) When invited to say what he is
reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard
of.
e.) There is only one book that arouses
unanimous admiration of the writer and his peers: Ulysses by James Joyace. No writer
will ever speak ill of this book, but when someone asks him what it’s about, he
can’t quite explain, making one doubt that he has actually read it.
Armed with all this information, I went back to my mother and explained
exactly what a writer was. She was somewhat surprised.
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