Paulo Coelho - Like the Flowing River - Thoughts and Reflections

Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

Be like the flowing river,

Silent in the night.

Be not afraid of the dark.

If there are stars in the sky, reflect them back.

If there are clouds in the sky,

Remember, clouds, like the river, are water,

So, gladly reflect them too,

In your own tranquil depths.

Manuel Bandeira

Cover Page

Title Page Like the Flowing River: Thoughts and Reflections Paulo Coelho Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

Epigraph Be like the flowing river, Silent in the night. Be not afraid of the dark. If there are stars in the sky, reflect them back. If there are clouds in the sky, Remember, clouds, like the river, are water, So, gladly reflect them too, In your own tranquil depths. Manuel Bandeira

Preface

A Day at the Mill

Prepared for Battle, But With a Few Doubts

The Way of the Bow

The Story of the Pencil

How to Climb Mountains

The Importance of a Degree

In a Bar in Tokyo

The Importance of Looking

Genghis Khan and His Falcon

Looking at Other People’s Gardens

Pandora’s Box

How One Thing Can Contain Everything

The Music Coming from the Chapel

The Devil’s Pool

The Solitary Piece of Coal

The Dead Man Wore Pyjamas

Manuel Is an Important and Necessary Man

Manuel Is a Free Man

Manuel Goes to Paradise

In Melbourne

The Pianist in the Shopping Mall

On My Way to the Chicago Book Fair

Of Poles and Rules

The Piece of Bread That Fell Wrong Side Up

Of Books and Libraries

Prague, 1981

For the Woman Who Is All Women

A Visitor Arrives from Morocco

My Funeral

Restoring the Web

These Are My Friends

How Do We Survive?

Marked Out to Die

The Moment of Dawn

A January Day in 2005

A Man L ying on the Ground

The Missing Brick

Raj Tells Me a Story

The Other Side of the Tower of Babel

Before a Lecture

On Elegance

Nhá Chica of Baependi

Rebuilding the House

The Prayer That I Forgot

Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro

Living Your Own Legend

The Man Who Followed His Dreams

The Importance of the Cat in Meditation

I Can’t Get In

Statutes for the New Millennium

Destroying and Rebuilding

The Warrior and Faith

In Miami Harbour

Acting on Impulse

Transitory Glory

Charity Under Threat

On Witches and Forgiveness

On Rhythm and the Road

Travelling Differently

A Fairy Tale

Brazil’s Greatest Writer

The Meeting That Did Not Take Place

The Smiling Couple (London, 1977)

The Second Chance

The Australian and the Newspaper Ad

The Tears of the Desert

Rome: Isabella Returns from Nepal

The Art of the Sword

In the Blue Mountains

The Taste of Success

The Tea Ceremony

The Cloud and the Sand Dune

Norma and the Good Things

Jordan, the Dead Sea, 21 June 2003

In San Diego Harbour, California

The Art of Withdrawal

In the Midst of War

The Soldier in the Forest

In a Town in Germany

Meeting in the Dentsu Gallery

Reflections on 11 September 2001

God’s Signs

Alone on the Road

The Funny Thing About Human Beings

An Around-the-World Trip After Death

Who Would Like This Twenty-Dollar Bill?

The Two Jewels

Self-Deception

The Art of Trying

The Dangers Besetting the Spiritual Search

My Father-in-law, Christiano Oiticica

Thank You, President Bush

The Intelligent Clerk

The Third Passion

The Catholic and the Muslim

Evil Wants Good to Prevail

The Law of Jante

The Old Lady in Copacabana

Remaining Open to Love

Believing in the Impossible

The Storm Approaches

Some Final Prayers

More about Paulo Coelho

Author Biography: Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho The Witch of Portobello

Heron Ryan, 44, journalist

Life is a journey

Feeling inspired?

Also by Paulo Coelho

Copyright

About the Publisher

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 the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He 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 sentence 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 one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read.

(d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: ‘Einstein is a fool’, or ‘Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.’ Everyone is scandalized, but they nevertheless go and tell other people that the theory of relativity is bunk, and that Tolstoy was a defender of the Russian aristocracy.

(e) When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: ‘I’m a writer’, and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.

(f) Given his vast culture, a writer can always get work as a literary critic. In that role, he can show his generosity by writing about his friends’ books. Half of any such reviews are made up of quotations from foreign authors and the other half of analyses of sentences, always using expressions such as ‘the epistemological cut’, or ‘an integrated bi-dimensional vision of life’. Anyone reading the review will say: ‘What a cultivated person’, but he won’t buy the book because he’ll be afraid he might not know how to continue reading when the epistemological cut appears.

(g) When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of.