By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (On the Seventh Day 1)
Meet Paulo Coelho
About the book
The Price of Hate and Pardon
About the author
Meet Paulo Coelho
PAULO COELHO was born in Rio de Janeiro in August 1947, the son of Pedro Queima Coelho de Souza, an engineer, and his wife Lygia, a homemaker. Early on Coelho dreamed of an artistic career, something frowned upon in his middle-class household. In the austere surroundings of a strict Jesuit school Coelho discovered his true vocation: to be a writer. Coelho's parents, however, had different plans for him. When their attempts to suppress his devotion to literature failed, they took it as a sign of mental illness. When Coelho was seventeen, his father twice had him committed to a mental institution where he endured sessions of electroconvulsive "therapy." His parents brought him to the institution once more after he became involved with a theater group and started to work as a journalist.
Coelho was always a nonconformist and a seeker of the new. In the excitement of 1968, the guerrilla and hippy movements took hold in a Brazil ruled by a repressive military regime. Coelho embraced progressive politics and joined the peace and love generation. He sought spiritual experiences by traveling all over Latin America in the footsteps of Carlos Castaneda. He worked in theater and dabbled in journalism, launching an alternative magazine called 2001. He began to collaborate as a lyricist with music producer Raul Seixas, transforming the Brazilian rock scene. In 1973 Coelho and Seixas joined the Alternative Society, an organization that defended the individual's right to free expression, and began publishing a series of comic strips calling for more freedom. Members of the organization were detained and imprisoned. Two days later Coelho was kidnapped and tortured by a paramilitary group.
This experience affected him profoundly. At the age of twenty-six Coelho decided that he had had enough of living on the edge and wanted to be "normal." He worked as an executive in the music industry. He tried his hand at writing, but didn't start seriously until after he had an encounter with a stranger. The man first came to him in a vision; two months later Coelho met him at a cafe in Amsterdam. The stranger suggested that Coelho should return to Catholicism and study the benign side of magic. He also encouraged Coelho to walk the Road to Santiago, the medieval pilgrim's route.
In 1987, a year after completing that pilgrimage, Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage. The book describes his experiences and his
discovery that the extraordinary occurs in the lives of ordinary people. A year later Coelho wrote a very different book, The Alchemist. The first edition sold only nine hundred copies and the publishing house decided not to reprint it.
"The first edition [of The Alchemist] sold only nine hundred copies and the publishing house decided not to reprint it."
Coelho would not surrender his dream. He found another publishing house, a bigger one. He wrote Brida (a work still unpublished in English); the book received a lot of attention in the press, and both The Alchemist and The Pilgrimage appeared on bestseller lists.
Paulo went on to write many other bestselling books, including The Valkyries, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, The Fifth Mountain, Warrior of the Light: A Manual, Eleven Minutes, The Zahir, and The Devil and Miss Prym.
Today, Paulo Coelho's books appear at the top of bestseller lists worldwide. In 2002 the Jornal de Letras of Portugal, the foremost literary authority in the Portuguese language, bestowed upon The Alchemist the title of book with most copies sold in the history of the language. In 2003 Coelho's novel Eleven Minutes was the world's bestselling fiction title (USA Today, Publishing Trends).
In addition to his novels, Coelho writes a globally syndicated weekly newspaper column and occasionally publishes articles on current affairs. His newsletter, Warrior of the Light Online, has over seventy thousand subscribers.
Coelho and his wife, Christina Oiticica, are the founders of the Paulo Coelho Institute, which provides support and opportunities for underprivileged members of Brazilian society.
About the book
The Price of Hate and Pardon
In By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept Pilar learns to free herself from the Other, to grab hold of the magic moment before her, and to forgive so that she may truly love. Paulo Coelho reflects in this essay on the price we pay when we do not let go of hate, the rewards we garner when we learn to pardon, and the importance of paying attention to every opportunity life offers.
IN MY NOTES for the year 1989 I came across some sentences jotted down from a conversation I had with J, whom I call my "master." At the time we were talking about an unknown mystic named Kenan Rifai, about whom little has been written.
"Kenan Rifai says that when people praise us we should watch how we behave," says J, "because that means that we hide our faults very well. We end up believing that we are better than we thought and then the next step is to let ourselves be lulled into a false sense of security that will eventually set up dangers all around us."
"How can we be attentive to the opportunities that life gives us?"
"If you have only two opportunities, learn how to turn them into twelve. When you have twelve they will multiply automatically. That is why Jesus says: 'he who has a lot will have a lot more given. He who has little will have that little taken from him.'"
"That is one of the harshest sentences in the Gospels. But I have noticed throughout my life that it is absolutely true. So how can we identify the opportunities?"
"'Pay attention to every moment, because the opportunity--the 'magic moment'--is within our reach, although we always let it pass by because we feel guilty.'"
"Pay attention to every moment, because the opportunity--the 'magic moment'--is within our reach, although we always let it pass by because we feel guilty. So try not to waste your time blaming yourself; the universe will see to correcting you if you're not worthy of what you're doing."
"And how is the universe going to correct me?"
"It won't be through tragedies; these happen because they are part of life, and they should not be thought of as punishments. The universe generally shows us that we are wrong when it takes away what is most important to us: our friends.
"Kenan Rifai was a man who helped many people find themselves and achieve a harmonious relation with life. Even so, some of those people proved to be ungrateful and never even turned their head to say 'thanks.' They turned to him only when their lives were in a state of utter confusion. Rifai helped them again without mentioning the past; he was a man with many friends, and the ungrateful always ended up on their own."
"Those are fine words, but I don't know if I am capable of pardoning ingratitude so easily."