-Paulo Coelho
“Madness is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you, but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there. ; all of us, one way or another, are mad.”
The book talks about numerous definitions of madness, what is your definition of madness?
“She was protected against her will, her freely expressed desire to destroy it” , Veronika ends up in a mental asylum after a failed suicide attempt. She unknowingly affects the life of certain people within that premise. She just strikes a different string in each one of them, she was different, all of them were in there to heal themselves or the world demanded them to heal their ways to blend in society and not outbreak its patterns. But Veronika, she was in there to die. She couldn’t wait to die, even all the authorities of the asylum declared that her life and heart would no more be pumping in this world for more than a week. We all accept she is going to die but as soon as you know the writer’s name: Paulo Coelho , do you think he could ever let anyone die without leaving an everlasting impression and message in your brain.
“People talked more openly to a psychiatrist than they did to a priest because a doctor couldn’t threaten them with hell” says Dr. Igor the head of Villete, the mental asylum. He is rooted deep within his profession and keeps researching and observing his patients coming up with various experiments and simple conclusions like: “Once in a mental hospital, a person grows used to the freedom that exists in the world of madness and become addicted to it” to which all I can say is if given an environment where I’ve no rules and someone else is paying my bills of stay and food, I might consider that as an option. Also, imagine the conversations you’ll encounter with people who are out of their mind.
“People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.” Veronika rediscovers her wish to be a pianist in the asylum, even Eduard wanted to paint but both of them had to leave their passions due to societal expectations. Art is not the only passion described here in this book. Another patient Mari who used to experience panic attacks wanted to volunteer in social services and leave her Law practice but again the society made her feel left out and mad for trying to leave a routine job for something with no security. A huge part of society agrees that being an artist requires some sort of chemical imbalances or any special something that makes it stand out from the larger population. People often argue that art comes out of grief and pain and also glorifying heartbreaks and other traumas. I truly believe that everyone has an artist inside them just waiting for one extra push and indifference from this world waiting to sing out loud or dance with the rhythm of his heart, paint realities which are no less than magic, write any parallels he wishes to and just create wonders. Any break from the patterns and monotony can prove to be beautiful and worthy, we were born different not to be clones of each other and fit inside the same box. “Run the risk of being different, but learn to do so without attracting attention.” This is the conclusion I could draw from this book, a beautiful teaching, one should try to keep his own identity alive and yet understand that not everyone from this world will be pleased by it so learn to play along. That’s when you achieve the best of both worlds.
