Initiatory Tales: 12 Books Worth Knowing

Denoting both imagined adventures and accounts of real events, initiatory tales set out a number of ordeals and obstacles that unfold over a long period. They often bring about suffering that the character must overcome, emerging "the greater" for it. The protagonist we follow always comes out transformed in the way they think and/or act. Since Voltaire, the tradition of initiatory tales designed to make us think has endured. A short anthology of famous tales.

Initiatory Tales: 12 Books Worth Knowing

Candide by Voltaire: the forerunner

• "Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and need"

• We must cultivate our garden.
• I know too, said Candide, that we must cultivate our garden. – You are right, said Pangloss; for when man was placed in the garden of Eden, he was placed there ut operaretur eum, so that he might work: which proves that man was not born for rest.
• Let us work without reasoning, said Martin; it is the only way to make life bearable. "
• The whole little society entered into this laudable design; each began to exercise his talents. The small plot of land yielded a great deal.
• Men are devoured by more envy, cares and anxieties than a besieged town endures in calamities.
• What is merely difficult gives no pleasure in the long run.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: a classic of the genre

• "All grown-ups were once children, but few of them remember it."

• "You know... when you are terribly sad, you love sunsets..."

• "Goodbye, said the fox. Here is my secret. It is very simple: one sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
• The Earth is no ordinary planet! It has one hundred and eleven kings (not forgetting, of course, the Negro kings), seven thousand geographers, nine hundred thousand businessmen, seven and a half million drunkards, three hundred and eleven million vain men — that is to say, about two billion grown-ups. Admittedly these figures are no longer true today, but I find it a wonderfully original definition of the planet Earth.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho: life as a personal quest for happiness

• "My heart is afraid of suffering, the young man said to the alchemist, one night as they were looking at a moonless sky. Tell it that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no one has ever suffered while pursuing their dreams."

• "Within me I hold the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything that was created in the Universe. We were made by the same Hand, and we have the same Soul."

• "There is only one thing that can make a dream impossible: the fear of failure."

• "We are loved because we are loved. No reason is needed for loving."

• "The secret of life, however, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times."

The Neverending Story by Micheal Ende: on the importance of imagination and self-confidence

• "Who has never spent a whole afternoon over a book, ears burning and hair dishevelled, reading and reading again, oblivious to the world around them, deaf to hunger and cold. Who has never read in secret, under the blanket, by torchlight, because a father or a mother or some well-meaning person had switched off the light, in the laudable belief that the moment had now come to sleep since tomorrow one would have to rise early. Who has never shed, openly or in secret, bitter tears at seeing a wonderful story come to an end, knowing that one would have to take leave of the beings with whom one had shared so many adventures, whom one loved and admired, for whom one had trembled and hoped, and without whose company life would seem empty and devoid of meaning."
• Whoever has no past has no future either.
• Men live on ideas. And those ideas can be steered. That power is the only thing that counts.

La rivière à l'envers ("The River Running Backwards") by Jean-Claude Mourlevat: rather like The Alchemist for young readers

• The story you are about to read takes place at a time when modern comforts had not yet been invented. Television game shows did not exist, nor cars with airbags, nor superstores. Mobile phones were not even known! But there were already rainbows after the rain, apricot jam with almonds in it, impromptu midnight swims — in short, all those things we still enjoy today. There were also, alas, heartaches and hay fever, against which nothing truly effective has yet been found. In brief, it was… long ago.
• Then Tomek did two things at once. The first was to answer: "Yes, I sell barley sugar." And the second thing Tomek did, he who in all his life had never turned around three times to look at a girl, was to fall in love with this slip of a young woman — to fall in love instantly, completely and for ever.
• Only here's the thing: Tomek had a secret. Oh, it was nothing bad, nor anything so extraordinary. It had come upon him so slowly that he had noticed nothing at all. Exactly like hair growing without one realising: one fine day it is too long and there you are. So one fine day Tomek found himself with this thought that had grown inside his head instead of on top of it, and which could be summed up thus: he was bored. Worse than that, he was… very bored indeed. He wanted to leave, to see the world.

Le Voyage de Théo ("Theo's Journey") by Catherine Clément: in search of spirituality

• I am not one of those who want to forbid cars from driving on Saturdays, but I know the meaning of the seventh day. - So do I. You have to rest, that's all. - No, my boy, he went on gently. The seventh day is the day of emptiness. You stop at last. You do nothing. Only then can you begin to do again. Because if you are doing all the time, tell me, is that a life? The seventh day is not rest, it is the celebration of silence. The alternation between the world and yourself. A necessary hollow.
• There are two ways of getting to know religions. The first consists in stopping at what you see with your own eyes. Then you see the worst of it and you are disgusted. The other way consists in trying to learn more, in order to understand the grain of truth hidden beneath the excesses like a jewel beneath a heap of straw.
• Separations always cause suffering, my boy. They hollow out an emptiness inside, and to understand what good they do takes time.
  - The good that suffering does? Whatever next?
  - Of course it is hard to believe. You will know sadness and then, one fine morning, calm will settle in. To begin with, you will have no appetite, you will see neither the trees nor the flowers, until the day when, without knowing why, you will wake up made new. You will look around you and realise that life goes on and that, having come through the ordeal, you are stronger than before.

Les Thanatonautes ("The Thanatonauts") by Bernard Werber: on death and the meaning of life

• "Anyone could claim to have spoken with an angel and bring back from up there their own little scoop in the shape of a thunderclap. And so the short television news announced that the trail of Adolf Hitler had been found. He was said to have been reincarnated as a bonsai."- "I considered the matter and the obvious struck me. The life of a bonsai is permanent torment. You put a plant in a pot too small for it and then you systematically cut back every new growth. It is the torture of a plant raised to the level of an art. Without water, its limbs endlessly cut back, without space, without air, without nourishment, the bonsai is nothing but suffering. Forced not to grow, the shrub remains for ever dwarfed, whereas everything that lives on this earth has the most elementary of rights, which is the right to grow." - "The subtlest punishment for an abominable war criminal was indeed to reincarnate him as a Japanese bonsai."
• Being nasty obliges you to concern yourself with others, to worry about their defences, to dream up mean tricks. But being nice allows you neither to touch nor to be touched by anyone. Niceness is just a comfortable way of being left in peace.
  

Life of Pi by Yann Martel: spirituality and survival

• That which is high brings low, and that which is low lifts up. I tell you, if you were in a situation as desperate as the one I found myself in, your thoughts too would rise. The deeper one is in the abyss, the more the spirit wants to take flight. What could be more natural than that, destitute and desperate as I was, given over to relentless suffering, I should have turned towards God?

If you stumble over the question of what is believable, what is life for? Is love not hard to believe?

- Mr Patel…

- Spare me your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with what is hard to believe?

- We are simply being reasonable.

- And so am I! I have used my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for feeding yourself, clothing yourself, housing yourself. Reason is the best toolbox there is. There is nothing like reason for keeping tigers at bay. But if you are excessively reasonable, you risk throwing the whole universe out of the window.

• In the trade, we are fond of saying that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is man.

Les Sept Plumes de l'aigle ("The Seven Feathers of the Eagle") by Henri Gougaud: a tale of shamanism

• Entering adulthood is a birth. It is a difficult passage. Many refuse it because they want to face neither the suffering of being alone, nor the freedom of inventing their own life. Until your death and even beyond it you will have to grow, and grow again, to become ever more adult.
• One day I pushed open the door on which was written: " lessen the pain of distance " and I entered the palace of memory. There were living books everywhere. Among a thousand others I decided to explore the pain and the absence of the beloved. It appeared to me at once that this pain was a curable illness. I ventured further into the hall. Among a thousand other voices, I heard this: " rather than shutting yourself away in grief and indifference, cultivate the sensations the beloved left in you, give life again, within your innermost self, to tenderness and gentleness. If you revive those past moments of happiness, if you help them to grow, to blossom, to fill your whole being, the distance will gradually shrink, the pain will gradually fade. You can recreate what forgetting has worn away "

The Parrot's Theorem by Denis Guedj: seeking meaning through science

• By the way, did I tell you what "hooked" me on Pythagoras? He invented the word friendship; did you know that? When he was asked what a friend is, he answered: "The one who is my other self, as 220 and 284 are." Two numbers are "friendly", or "amicable", if each is the sum of everything that measures the other. The two most famous amicable numbers in the Pythagorean pantheon are 220 and 284. They make a fine pair. Check it, if you have the time. And the two of us, are we "friends"? What measures you, Pierre? And me? The time has come, perhaps, to add up all that has measured us.
• A dwarf seated on the highest step is higher than a giant standing on the lowest.
• … for centuries, the Western world has arrogated to itself the power to name things on behalf of all humanity.

Malhorne : le trait d'union des mondes ("Malhorne: The Hyphen Between Worlds") by Jérôme Camut: reincarnation

• Despite my many experiences of this moment, death still manages to frighten me. My heart was pounding and no doubt that hastened the process. The sun vanished into the mists skimming the horizon. My brain registered this last image but my old chest no longer rose. So life passes. The days flow like grains of dust through the funnel of an hourglass. At first there are so many of them that you imagine yourself eternal. Squandering them is nothing at all, then. And then you grow older and it is time to realise that life is precious, that the days are numbered. Sometimes you find yourself full of regret, but it is already too late and any turning back has become impossible. The carcass withers, as the autumn winds carry the leaves towards the bite of winter. You long for rest and the embers of former days become a poor fire, barely smouldering. And so it is time to die.

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder: understanding philosophy

• "Honour the brief springtime of life

Which is the source of all things on earth!

The most minute shall know resurrection too,

Only the forms are lost.

Generations beget new generations,

Letting humanity flourish further still;

The species begets the species.

For millions of years

Worlds decline and are born anew.

Join in the joy of life, you who were able to bloom

In its springtime,

Savour each moment as a tribute from the eternal

Offered to the condition of humankind;

Bring your own modest contribution

To the infinite whirl

Though weak and insignificant,

Drink deep

Of the eternity of this day!

Bjornstjerne Bjornson"

Happy reading

Summary table: the 12 initiatory tales at a glance