I heard on NPR today that there is a school in Philadelphia, I think, that’s assigning Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist as required reading for all high-schoolers. My first reaction was to laugh. Not that I stood out as particularly cynical among my peers, but I can’t imagine anybody getting me to take The Alchemist seriously past the age of 11.
But then I wondered if this might be my problem. What if it’s not such a bad thing that there should be a culture where it’s normal to celebrate a 14-year-old for managing to move a tangle of cords from one box to another? I’m not being sarcastic here. These kids live in a kinder, gentler world, so why shouldn’t they remain innocent enough to take The Alchemist seriously at the age of 16? If I grew up in a harsher reality that made me too cynical to admire the famous clock or to enjoy The Alchemist, maybe I shouldn’t be projecting that inner misery onto people who, through no fault of their own, are more fortunate?
A friend of mine told me yesterday that she is saving to buy a trip to Europe for her daughter and the daughter’s girlfriend. The daughter and the girlfriend are my age and quite successful professionally, so my question to the friend was, “Hey, isn’t Helen a little too ancient for you to help her out financially?”
And now I feel like I’m begrudging Helen the opportunity to remain a daughter who is pampered by her mother in a world that is gentler than mine. I guess that, on some level, what I really feel is envy of Helen, Ahmed of the Clock, and high-schoolers with their copies of The Alchemist. There is no need for them to be schooled in hardship because this is not the kind of life that awaits them. And that’s a good thing.
Clarissa's Blog 
For the record, I would not be impressed with the clock if I thought Ahmed had just moved something from one case to another. I would be impressed if he managed to pull off something like this project in 40 minutes:
http://sdgelectronics.co.uk/ledclock-projects/
I haven’t read The Alchemist, so I can’t comment on that. The chapter books that I remember being assigned in high school were Night by Elie Wiezel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Black Boy by Richard Wright and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. All but the last one were fairly cynical books.
I mostly remember my classmates as people who were making an effort not to be cynical.
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There are now people who are showing how this can be done in under 40 seconds. It’s all a huge controversy now. I’m glad I’m not the one who thinks, “Here I have been accumulating achievements and overcoming hardship for 40 years, and it’s not enough, and this kid makes a 40 – second (minute, hour, whatever) effort and everybody is ready to give him a Nobel.” The green-eyed beast is strong. 🙂
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Operating under the assumption that he was cheating, it could be done in under 40 seconds. I was referring solely to the tutorial I linked above and others like it.
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PC is so completely inane that a gentler world, ironically, would contain people whose main job would be to ridicule it.
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I was reading Kafka’s The Trial at that age, which I suppose was meant as a warning for me not to go into the legal profession …
Fools — even at that age, I knew where power wasn’t. 🙂
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Of course, I’d much rather kids read Kafka than The Alchemist which has nothing to do with literature.
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