'Aleph' and the love that awakens us

James Martorano

We all need a muse.

Not necessarily someone who gives us answers, but someone who inspires us to ask better questions — someone who reminds us that beneath the anxieties and routines of daily life remains an enormous mystery: that we are alive, that we can love, and that, briefly, we are permitted to share this astonishing experience with others.

I am fortunate to have such a person in my friend Laura. It was Laura who suggested that I read Paulo Coelho’s "Aleph." I expected an interesting novel. I did not expect to be so deeply affected by it. Above all, the book made me think about love — its courage, its dangers, its power to forgive, and its mysterious ability to free us from the identities in which we become trapped.

Aleph begins with a paradox. Coelho, writing himself into his novel, possesses nearly everything that should make a person feel fulfilled. Yet he feels empty. His success has become disconnected from the person who achieved it. He is not lost in the ordinary sense. He knows where he is; he simply no longer knows how to feel fully present there.

Coelho travels across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The train becomes a metaphor for life. Everyone aboard moves through the same landscape, yet each passenger carries a different history and destination. For a while, strangers share meals, stories and silences before separating. Isn’t that largely what life is? We encounter one another somewhere between arrival and departure, never knowing which meetings will be incidental and which will change us forever.

On the journey, Coelho meets Hilal, a young violinist who insists their connection reaches beyond the present. He resists her. Yet she has not entered his life to make it more comfortable; she has appeared to disturb the identity in which he has become trapped. During a previous existence, Coelho was a priest of the Inquisition who participated in her torture and then remained silent when she was condemned. When love demanded courage, he chose self-preservation.

The episode reminds us that love is not only comfort; it is also a demand upon our courage. But love has a darker counterfeit, and I have witnessed its consequences too many times as an attorney. I have seen what two people once called love deteriorate into jealousy, domination, possession and even violence. I have seen affection become surveillance, devotion become control and intimacy used to justify cruelty. Courtrooms are filled with the ruins of relationships in which one person believed love conferred the right to dictate where the other went, whom the other saw or whether the other could leave.

Those experiences taught me to be cautious when love is used to excuse conduct that has little to do with it. Jealousy may accompany love, but it is not proof of love. Possession may masquerade as devotion, but another human being can never become our property. Violence is not love intensified; it is love abandoned. Genuine love does not diminish the beloved’s individuality. It enlarges it. It recognizes that the person we cherish possesses a life independent of ours — and honors the freedom that makes that person who he or she is.

Whether we believe literally in reincarnation is almost beside the point. We all carry unfinished histories into our relationships: old fears, remembered abandonments, unspoken guilt and wounds inflicted before the person now standing before us entered our lives. Sometimes we react not only to the present, but to everything that has made us afraid of rejection or loss. We may punish an innocent person for an injury inflicted years ago. Most of us, if honest, will recognize some version of this within ourselves.

The Aleph is a mystical point where past, present and future can be experienced simultaneously. Perhaps love is also a kind of Aleph. When we love deeply, we see not only the person before us, but the child that person once was, the wounds life created, the hopeful self still struggling to emerge and the aging person who may one day need our care. To be truly loved may mean being seen across time — not reduced to our worst mistake or the worst thing that happened to us.

That is why forgiveness occupies such an important place in the novel. Coelho must acknowledge that he failed Hilal; he cannot explain away his cowardice or demand release from it. Hilal must decide whether she will remain imprisoned within the identity of the betrayed woman. Forgiveness does not declare that cruelty did not matter. It does not mean forgetting or excusing. It means deciding that an injury, however terrible, will not be given permanent control over the soul.

Nor does forgiveness require a victim to return to danger. It does not demand reconciliation with someone who remains controlling or violent. Sometimes the most loving act is departure. Forgiveness may release the past internally, but it need not restore access to someone who abused it.

That is the true work of a muse — and perhaps one of the purest expressions of love. A muse does not merely praise or console us. She sees possibilities in us that we may have neglected and makes them harder to ignore. She reminds us that whatever suffering life has imposed, we must continue to think, create, feel and grow.

This leads to the book’s most liberating idea: sometimes we must free ourselves from our own identity. Each of us carries a story — I am successful. I am wounded. I was abandoned. I must never appear weak. These identities may contain truth, but they become dangerous when mistaken for the entirety of the self. Love can loosen them because another person may see us differently. Through that person’s eyes, we glimpse a self not imprisoned by yesterday. Love at its best does not confine us to a role. It gives us room to become.

Laura’s recommendation was therefore more than the gift of a remarkable book. It was an invitation to consider what love can mean when one person awakens another. Perhaps the people who love and inspire us are themselves small Alephs — points at which our past, present and possible future briefly meet. Through them, we remember who we were, understand who we are, and imagine who we might yet become.

That may be one of love’s greatest gifts. It does not rescue us from life’s complexities or grant us ownership of those we cherish. It asks something harder: that we draw close without imprisoning, care deeply without controlling and remain vulnerable without turning fear into a weapon. And if we are very fortunate, it gives us someone with whom the mystery feels no less mysterious, but infinitely more worth exploring.