Ayn Rand, Paulo Coelho

I’ve finally got my reading chops back after a few months’ hiatus, and it feels good.

I swallowed two books whole in the past two days: Ayn Rand’s Anthem and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.  Really, the two pieces couldn’t be more different…and yet I walked away from both with more or less the same message.

Anthem is a dystopian work about a future society whose totalitarian government has essentially eradicated the individual.  In her characteristically sociopathic way, Rand describes the defection of one man who discovers that there’s more to life than being a part of the whole.  She harps on the theme of man being held back from his destiny by the needs and weaknesses of others.

“Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish.  I am not a tool for their use.  I am not a servant to their needs.  I am not a bandage for their wounds.  I am not a sacrifice on their altars.”

“But what is freedom?  Freedom from what?  There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men.  To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.  That is freedom.  This and nothing else.”

So here we have the man whose path to self-discovery necessitates a complete schism with society.  Fair enough.

In the Coelho, just as in the Rand, the focus is on self-discovery.  But where Rand advocates a separation from the world, Coelho says just the opposite.  In The Alchemist, the protagonist does separate himself from the ideals of the world, but he does not run from his fellow man.  The emphasis is on unity, not only with other men but with everything.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes:
“The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s all written there.”

I liked both books well enough.  Stylistically, I prefer Anthem.  The Alchemist is a little too theoretical for my taste – it read like Nietzsche.  Anthem felt a little more concrete, and I always enjoy a book that makes me feel that I have both feet planted firmly on the ground.  But I found the message of the Coelho to be a whole lot more appealing, simply because he’s not a raging world-hater like Rand.

So, Rand says that one must run from the world in order to break free from its bonds.  Coelho says that the path to individuality comes through an immersion into the world.  But in the end, both books convey the idea that self-discovery is the most important thing of all.