The Writer as Alchemist

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”

He’s right, you know. That’s what this all boils down to in the end — alchemy. Writers are alchemists: gnarled, erudite things locked away in dark rooms, trying to achieve immortality. That’s what I’m doing now, even — what all writers end up doing if they sit down to seriously write something — we try to create the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of Life.

If you can just put the right letters in the right order, you can live forever.

That’s how it works: if you put the right letters in the right order —( we’re still working with runes, in a way; still trying to draw a dateless and terrible magick out of rough shapes and symbols )— if you can just get the right letters in the right order, I say, you never have to die.

Homer did it, Sophocles did it, Virgil did it; Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cervantes; Woolf, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce — grand masters of the art and magicians of frightening power — deathless, all of them.

Magnum Opus has two definitions, the first and most common is “the greatest achievement of an artist or writer,” the second — and the original meaning of the term — is “the process of creating the philosopher’s stone.”

Perfect, right? The scary thing is I only found that out halfway through writing this.

Now come over here, Albertus, let’s compare notes and try and get it right this time…