How do you touch the soul? By love or by lust? Can you touch the soul like a body and vice versa? “Eleven Minutes” by Paulo Coelho is a provocative modern fairy tale about the alchemy of love. Maria, a young woman from the Brazilian hinterland, finds her way to Europe out of a thirst for adventure and the search for great love. She becomes a sex worker and Coelho describes her reflections about sexuality, lust, and love.
Thoughts like “In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel” or “Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it – which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?” encourage self-reflection in this book. The author gives the reader exciting impulses throughout the book. “Sex has come to be used as some kind of a drug: in order to escape reality, to forget about problems, to relax. And like all drugs, this is a harmful and destructive practice. … A person who lives life intensely enjoys the time, even without sex. And when having sex, it’s out of abundance. Like a glass of wine that is filled until it inevitably overflows. The physical union is just as inevitable, because at this moment one accepts the call of life, because then – and only then – we are able to let go, to give up control.”
Maria gets to know and enjoy the world of SM with a customer: “When I had nothing more to lose, I was given everything. When I ceased to be who I am, I found myself. When I experienced humiliation and yet kept on walking, I understood that I was free to choose my destiny.” Coelho describes interesting lines of thought in this topic as well, and with the insights of a Japanese lumberjack and the principles of Shugendō, Maria’s worldview is “adjusted” (whether it is necessary or not remains questionable).
A beautiful metaphor from the book “Eleven Minutes” is quoted here: “Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy, colorful, marvelous feathers. One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird. But then she thought: He might want to visit far-off mountains! And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she thought: “I’m going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again.” The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage. She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: “Now you have everything you could possibly want.” However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage. One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds.”
All of us will have acted this way before. Unconsciously, driven by supposed love, passion or behind the pretext of fetishism, but inflicting suffering on us or others out of weakness or fear without having questioned our actions. Stories and challenges like this make this book absolutely worth reading.