Aleph

Aleph

Paulo Coelho

Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny.

In his most personal novel to date, internationally best-selling author Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Like the main character in his much-beloved The Alchemist, Paulo is facing a grave crisis of faith. As he seeks a path of spiritual renewal and growth, he decides to begin again: to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the landscapes around him.

Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny.In his most personal novel to date, internationally best-selling author Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Like the main character in his much-beloved The Alchemist, Paulo is facing a grave crisis of faith. As he seeks a path of spiritual renewal and growth, he decides to begin again: to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the landscapes around him.

Setting off to Africa, and then to Europe and Asia via the Trans-Siberian Railway, he initiates a journey to revitalize his energy and passion. Even so, he never expects to meet Hilal. A gifted young violinist, she is the woman Paulo loved five hundred years before—and the woman he betrayed in an act of cowardice so far-reaching that it prevents him from finding real happiness in this life. Together they will initiate a mystical voyage through time and space, traveling a path that teaches love, forgiveness, and the courage to overcome life’s inevitable challenges. Beautiful and inspiring, Aleph invites us to consider the meaning of our own personal journeys: Are we where we want to be, doing what we want to do?

Paulo Coelho

ALEPH

Translated from by Margaret Jull Costa

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for those who turn to you. Amen.

A certain nobleman went into a far country, to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return.

—Luke 19:12

For J., who keeps me walking,

S.J., who continues to protect me,

Hilal, for her words of forgiveness

in the church in Novosibirsk

The Aleph was about two to three centimetres in diameter, but all of cosmic space was there, with no diminution in size. Each thing was infinite, because I could clearly see it from every point on the universe.

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

Thou knowest all—I cannot see.

I trust I shall not live in vain,

I know that we shall meet again,

In some divine eternity.

—Oscar Wilde, “The True Knowledge”

King of My Kingdom

OH, NO, NOT ANOTHER RITUAL! Not another invocation intended to make the invisible forces manifest in the visible world! What has that got to do with the world we live in today? Graduates leave university and can’t find a job. Old people reach retirement and have almost nothing to live on. Grown-ups have no time to dream, struggling from nine to five to support their families and pay for their children’s education, always bumping up against the thing we all know as “harsh reality.”

The world has never been as divided as it is now, what with religious wars, genocides, a lack of respect for the planet, economic crises, depression, poverty, with everyone wanting instant solutions to at least some of the world’s problems or their own. And things look only bleaker as we head into the future.

What am I doing here, trying to make my way in a spiritual tradition whose roots are in the remote past, far from all the challenges of the present moment?

…

ALONG WITH J., whom I call my Master, although I’m beginning to have doubts about that, I am walking toward the sacred oak tree, which, for more than five hundred years, has stood there, impassively contemplating humanity’s woes, its one concern being to surrender its leaves in winter and recover them in spring.

I can’t stand to write any more about my relationship with J., my guide in the Tradition. I have dozens of diaries full of notes of our conversations, which I never bother to reread. Since our first meeting in Amsterdam, in 1982, I have learned and unlearned how to live hundreds of times. Whenever J. teaches me something new, I think that perhaps this will be the last step required to reach the top of the mountain, the note that justifies a whole symphony, the word that sums up an entire book. I go through a period of euphoria, which gradually dissipates. Some things stay forever, but most of the exercises, practices, and teachings end up disappearing down a black hole. Or so it seems.