Treasure?

I’m sure that if I actually post this it will cause a stir because I unlike most of you (guessing from class discussion) did not think that The Alchemist was cheesy. I thought that it held an excellent message. I think that we must remember as English Majors that not every piece of writing is written for us. The Alchemist is a lowbrow book written for the lowbrow masses. The lowbrow masses don’t need to be stimulated to find the connections between literature and other literature. The lowbrow masses need direction in their lives. LRES majors don’t need to know that FW is all-encompassing. Engineers don’t need to understand plurosis and kenosis. And if you are thinking as you read this ‘well they should, then everyone would be enlightened’ you are kidding yourself. The Alchemist was written to make people see that their ‘personal legend’ is ok to follow. That it is acceptable to set out, experience, and find the treasure of themselves. It is the English Majors that have a problem with this because they “get more experiences out of literature than you could ever get from travel.” (I cry bull but that is beside the point) We as English students have a way of looking down on our noses at people who don’t understand literature, or don’t create literature to our level. It made me chuckle in class today because people had such a problem with Santiago having to go back to the tree to find the treasure. The point is that the money is not his treasure. More than once he had in his possession a sum equal to his treasure. The treasure was the experience. The treasure was seeing things to know they existed, and finding out what really mattered. This cult rather disgusts me because we are so stuck in how highbrow we are we forget that not every piece of literature has a secret meaning, not every story means something else. Sometimes things aren’t written for us, they are written for people who just need a little motivation. Santiago’s experience was a treasure to millions of people because it inspired them to go live. This class found it annoying and cheesy and overt. Well duh it was written for people who need things spelled out clearly for them. So shut-up and enjoy the treasure you’ve found in your intelligence, instead of trying to please the cult and make yourselves into totally asses.