The End...

We finish blogging with a final post about The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. This will be the last blog in the last week of class of my last year of college. It's a week of a lot of "lasts", and yet as cliche as it sounds, I know this ending is really a beginning. I'm moving to Nashville to start a new life there, and I'm excited, though nervous at the same time. Aren't these the same emotions the characters in the books experienced as they "grew up"? It's the tension of closing a door on childhood and opening one into adulthood, all part of the process we've labeled "coming of age", and it's time to continue this process in my own life.

The Alchemist is a good novel to end on, and I say that not because I adore it like so many others seem to. Maybe that's part of the reason I don't like it: I want to go against the bandwagon; the novel receives such high acclaim that I become suspicious. What I do mean is that it is good to end on because it is so obviously a bildungsroman, with the idea of the personal legend so closely tied to coming of age. As we talked about in class, childhood is, in so many ways, about innocence and dreaming. At that point in life, we lack the ability to see the big picture and to know what we're called to do, so we latch on to what looks nice and fun. There must be a process of bridging the gap between this innocence in order to cross into informed, productive adulthood. The tension is in finding a balance: continuing to dream big, while applying the tools we've learned along the way in order to do so. Santiago's journey to find himself and his purpose mark in a simple but profound way the process that I've been caught up in and that we've been describing all semester.