"The Zahir" - Paulo Coelho

…..

"It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over. Slowly, I began to realize that I could not go back and force things to be as they once were: those two years, which up until then had seemed an endless inferno, were now beginning to show me their true meaning.

And that meaning went far beyond my marriage: all men and all women are connected by an energy which many people call love, but which is, in fact, the raw material from which the universe was built. This energy cannot be manipulated, it leads us gently forward, it contains all we have to learn in this life. If we try to make it go in the direction we want, we end up desperate, frustrated, disillusioned, because that energy is free and wild.

We could spend the rest of our life saying that we love such a person or thing, when the truth is that we are merely suffering because, instead of accepting love’s strength, we are trying to diminish it so that it fits the world in which we imagine we live.

The more I thought about this, the weaker the Zahir became and the closer I moved towards myself…I remembered the lines from a poem I had learned as a child:

'When the Unwanted Guest arrives…
I might be afraid.
I might smile or say:
My day was good, let night fall.
You will find the fields ploughed, the house clean,
the table set,
and everything in its place.’

It would be nice if that were true — everything in its place… But what if I could choose an epitaph? I would ask to have these words engraved:

'He died while he was still alive.'

…That night I went to sleep smiling. The Zahir was disappearing and Esther was returning, and if I were to die then, despite all that had happened in my life, despite all my failures, despite the disappearance of the woman I loved, the injustices I had suffered or inflicted on others, I had remained alive until the last moment, and could with all certainty, affirm: “My day was good, let night fall.”



View all my reviews