Философская книга.

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were an audience member enjoying  the spectacle of a Chekhov
comedy in  which he himself may  or may not be  a character.
The  author  has  consistently  declined  --  over a span of
nearly three decades -- to engage  in the war of words about
whether  his  books  are  authentic  accounts  of real-world
encounters, as  he maintains, or  (as numerous critics  have
argued)  fictional allegories  in the  spirit of  Gulliver's
Travels and Alice in Wonderland.

This strategic reticence was  learned from don Juan himself.
"To slip in  and out of different worlds  you have to remain
inconspicuous,"   says  Castaneda,   who  is   rumored  (his
preferred status)  to divide his  time nowadays between  Los
Angeles, Arizona,  and Mexico. "The more  you are identified
by people's ideas  of who you are and how  you will act, the
greater the  constraint on your  freedom. Don Juan  insisted
upon the  importance of erasing personal  history. If little
by little  you create a  fog around yourself,  then you will
not be  taken for granted, and  you will have more  room for
change."

Even so,  scattered clearings in  the fog offer  glimpses of
tracks left by the sorcerer's apprentice in the years before
his life faded to myth.



The scholarly consensus, unconfirmed  by the author himself,
is  that Carlos  Cesar Arana  Castaneda was  born in Peru on
Christmas day 1925 in the historic Andean town of Cajamarca.
Upon graduating from the  Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Senora
de Guadalupe,  he studied briefly at  the National Fine Arts
School  of  Peru.  In  1948  his  family  moved  to Lima and
established a jewelry store. After the death of his mother a
year  later,  Castaneda  moved  to  San  Francisco  and soon
enrolled  at Los  Angeles City  College, where  he took  two
courses in creative writing and one in journalism.

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