Just an Idea....

I just had another thought. There is a Shel SilverStein poem/book called falling up. This is how the poem goes:

I tripped on my shoelace

And I fell up-

Up to the roof tops

Up past the tree tops

Up over the mountians

Up where the colors

Blend into the sounds

But it go me so dizzy

When I looked around

I got sick to my stomach

And I threw down

Falling up is a religious saying that talks about the faults of humanity and the ability of religion to save. I was thinking of this saying and this poem in contrast to the hilltops in the Alchemist. If authors write epiphanies on the top of mountains or staircases then their characters must be, in a writer's since, falling up. I don't want to get into the religious aspect. The saying can make sense in a purely technical way. A character standing on top of a mountain top is role playing. They are playing the part of the divine, this is the reason for the revelation, ect. But because they are ultimately human, and therefore, have human faults, they can never be in a place of true divinity. I would say they are falling up. A character, in an author's eye, is flawed. Even with these moments of divinity they are continuously falling. So when Santiago is on the top of the stone wall, he is having a moment of up. The Shel SilverStein poem is written for children, but as I have argued, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously. It is a lighthearted poem with a grand idea (or maybe it's just a lighthearted poem). Eliot says, or rather steals, "the way up is the way down." Even in our moments of "up" people must always come down, or fall. Eliot stealing, the way up is the way down, knows that no matter how high we climb and how epiphinised we get, there is always the fall which we must anticipate. It's like the Shel SilverStein cover picture. There is a moment where we are suspended in space, waiting to either float upwards some more or catch ourselves on the way down. A character, even when experiencing an epiphany on the top of a mountain, will always stay in the flawed state. It's not that they become the divine, they simply experience the divine in a form that keeps their perpetual humanity.