Question 2

Question 2.
Why does the king tell his story to be the boy before leaving? What relevance does it have to your life and Santiago’s?

The King’s story was of a boy trying to find the secret of happiness. He goes to a grand temple where a wise man lives. This man tells him to walk around the castle with a spoon of oil and not to drop any. He doesn’t see anything in the castle because he is too focused on not spilling the oil. So then the wise man tells him to go back and look at the castle’s details and so he does, but he spills all of the oil. When he returns the wise man tells him the secret of happiness: “The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.”
I believe that the purpose of the old man telling Santiago the story before he left was to remind him of the lesson that the story tells. The lesson is that no matter what you are doing, you must never forget your obligations, your purpose and responsibilities; to strike a balance. This will be important, I think, to the boy because even when the best of us have a clear path to follow, we often forget our purpose and stray away from the road. This is true for everyone in the whole world. Often times, temptations take us away from our true goals, and once we get lost it’s difficult to find our way back. Other times we can not even find the road because we are solely focused upon our work and we never see any of the beauty in the world. “A shepherd may like to travel, but he should never forget his sheep.”