TITLE: MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN ACCRA
AUTHOR: PAULO COELHO
Pages: 194
Date: 10/04/2013
Grade: 4+
Details: Received from HarperCollins
Through Nudge
Own
The year is 1099 (or 4859 or 492, depending on which
faith you belong to) and Jerusalem,
a place where three Faiths live peacefully side by side is about to be invaded
by crusaders. A man from Athens, known as the
Copt, talks to the citizens of Jerusalem.
He isn’t a Jew, Christian or Muslim and
“..believes only
in the present moment and what he calls Moira –the unknown god, The Divine
Energy, responsible for a single law, which, if ever broken, will bring about
the end of the world.”
In the tradition of ancient Greece
the Copt will answer questions about everyday life so that through the
preservation of his words the soul of Jerusalem
may be also be preserved. Every chapter starts with a simple question, as posed
by one of those listening. The beauty of those questions is that they are as
relevant today as they may have been in 1099 or at any other time in the future
or in the past. They are the sort of questions we all ask ourselves; some
regularly others infrequently or only once. Questions about fear, true enemies, defeat and struggle lead on
to inquiries about the will to change, and the virtues of loyalty and solitude.
Finally the questions that remain are those about beauty, sex, elegance, love,
wisdom and what the future holds. And if you take your time reading the
answers you will find that these are also simple; definitely profound but not complicated.
Nothing much is required of us except that we live our best life and do so from
a place of love. Which, of course, is nowhere near as simple as it sounds.
And so we find statements such as the following:
On defeat:
“Only he who gives
up is defeated. Everyone else is victorious.”
On uselessness:
“Don’t try to be
useful. Try to be yourself: that is enough, and makes all the difference.”
On beauty:
“Outer beauty is
inner beauty made visible, and it manifests itself in the light that flows from
our eyes.”
“And to those who
believe that adventures are dangerous I say, Try Routine: that kills you far
more quickly.”
On love:
“Love is an act of
faith, not an exchange.”
On Sex:
In sex, relaxation
and tension go hand in hand, as do pain and pleasure and shyness and the
courage to go beyond one’s limits.
How can such
opposite states exist in harmony together? There is only one way: by
surrendering yourself.
Because the act of
surrender means: ‘I trust you’.”
On success:
“People who seek
only success rarely find it, because success is not an end in itself, but a
consequence.”
“What is success?
It is being able to
go to bed each night with your soul at peace.”
On anxiety:
“It will never
disappear, but the great wisdom of life is to realise that we can be the
masters of the things that try to enslave us.”
On the future:
“What the future
holds for you depends entirely on your capacity for love.”
“Loving means being
open to miracles, to victories and defeats, to everything that happens each day
that is given us to walk upon the face of the Earth.”
On weapons:
“The most terrible
of all weapons is the word, which can ruin a life without leaving a trace of
blood, and whose wounds never heal.”
When night has fallen and the invasion is imminent the
Copt tells those who listened to him to go out into the world and share that
which they have heard, because:
“Do not think that I
am come to spread peace upon the Earth. No, from this night on, we will travel
the world bearing an invisible sword, so that we can fight the demons of
intolerance and lack of understanding.”
Manuscript found in Accra is exactly what you expect it to be:
deep, inspirational, spiritual and thought-provoking. Paulo Coelho is very good
at what he set out to do when he first released ‘The Alchemist’; he sought to bring inspiration and insight to many
and twenty-five years later that is exactly what he is still doing. And as with
every single one of Coelho’s previous works, this isn’t the sort of book you
read once, place on a shelf and never look at again. This book contains
information that you will find yourself revisiting time and again. There may be
times when you only re-read one particular section of the book because it is
relevant to your life at that particular time. At other times you may feel the
need to re-read the whole book because you need to make sense of the world as a
whole. Although a lot of the wisdom and sentiments in this book are things we
have read and heard before it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of them. On the other
hand, not everything in this book appears familiar. There are also chapters,
like the one on elegance, that explain the spirituality in places where I have
never thought to look for it:
“Elegance is not an
outer quality, but a part of the soul that is visible to others.”
This is a book to read slowly, allowing the words to
sink in. A book to keep in an accessible place so that you can pick it up
whenever you need some spiritual encouragement to get you through the day.
Don’t let the ease with which this book can be read mislead you. It would be
very easy to just fly through the book over the course of an afternoon, and you
would probably enjoy the read as well. But, unless you take the time to savour
the words and think about them, you are going to miss a lot.
