Inspirations By Paulo Coelho

 Inspirations  By Paulo Coelho, was 87 of 2020. 

This book was lying in the shelf for so many years, never felt like opening it, untill today, and once I opened it; every other book was kept aside. Was inspired by the way the titles were divided.

'Anthology' comes from the Greek word that stands for garlands - a bouquet of flowers. An anthology then, should be a sort of reminder of something else, a small token of something much larger. In the case of flowers, they bring with their fragrance and colorfulness the reminder of the fields, of a season. Coelho's anthology, therefore, is not only a collection of texts or poems, but a gift, something arranged according to his sensitivities, to give to others. The selection of books presented in this volume have been chosen as if from a vast field of flowers, stretching infinitely into time's horizon. He in his preface enlightens us as to what an anthology really means and goes on to tell us how difficult it was to choose not only the work but the passage within that work and also how to catalog them together that will make us not only open our “magic cabinet” of literature and reawaken our passion for that particular piece of literary history but for all of the choices he presents to us here.

Coelho's assortment of tidbits from many and varied classic tales of not only fiction but non fictions is ordered in to the four elements, symbolizing both our world on all its directions, and the way we dwell in this world, the way we say it. In :

'Water'  we find Hans Christian Anderson : the Ugly Duckling; 'The Prologue' from Tales form the Thousand and one Nights; Niccolo Machiavelli: from The Prince; Lewis Carroll: from Through the Looking-Glass -'Looking-glass House; Sun-tzu: from The Art of War - 'Forms and Dispositions'. 

Subtle Reams - Unconsciousness -Mind - Dreams - Strategy - Logic - Possibilities - Passivity - Mobility

'Earth' we find writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde: from De Profundis, Bram Stoker: from Dracula - 'Dr. Seward's Diary'; Hannah Arendt: from Eichmann and the Holocaust; W. B. Yeast: from Selected Poems - 'He wishes for the cloths of Heaven' and 'The song of Wandering Aengus' and D H Lawrence from Lady Chatterley's Lover

Winter -Body-Decay-womb-Mother-Receptive -Passive - Stagnation (prison) - Roots. 

'Air' Nelson Mandela: from No Easy Walk to Freedom - 'Black Man in a White Man's Court', Gabriel Garcia Marques: from One Hundred Years of Solitude; Robert Louis Stevenson: from The Stange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde - 'Henry Jekyll's full Statement of the Case'; George Orwell: from Nineteen Eighty - four; Jorge Luis Borges: from Fiction - 'The Library of Babel'.

Breath - Life - Communication-Action - Instability - Agitation (not action) 

'Fire' From the Rig Veda - 'Hymns to Agni, god of the Sacrifice', From The Desert Fathers - Sayings of the Early Christian Monks - 'Visions', From the Bhagavad Gita, From the Dead Sea Scrolls, Leopold Sacher - Masoch: from Venus in Furs, Kahlil Gibran: from The Prophet, Rumi: from Spiritual Verses, Rabindranath Tagore: from Selected Poems -Brahma, Vishnu, Siva and Mary Shelley: from Frankenstein; 

Spirit - Light - Heat - Darkness (smoke) Hymn - Hell - Motion: Root of all change

As you read the bouquet will come into focus. Coelho shows how  lessons can be learned in the most surprising places, and that books from  ancient Persia through to post-war Britain can each offer profound insights into our lives, our loves, and the truth in all our heart.