Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran

BOOK: Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran
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The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran

Philosophical Library

Table of Contents

PREFACE

TIMELINE

SELECTED QUOTES

TEARS AND LAUGHTER

The Creation

Have Mercy on Me, My Soul!

Two Infants

The Life of Love

The House of Fortune

Song of the Wave

A Poet's Death Is His Life

Peace

The Criminal

The Playground of Life

Song of Fortune

The City of the Dead

Song of the Rain

The Widow and Her Son

The Poet

Song of the Soul

Laughter and Tears

Song of the Flower

Vision

Song of Love

Two Wishes

Song of Man

Yesterday and Today

Before the Throne of Beauty

Leave Me, My Blamer

A Lover's Call

The Beauty of Death

The Palace and the Hut

A Poet's Voice

The Bride's Bed

BETWEEN NIGHT & MORN

The Tempest

Slavery

Satan

The Mermaids

We and You

The Lonely Poet

Ashes of the Ages and Eternal Fire

Between Night and Morn

SECRETS OF THE HEART

The Secrets of the Heart

My Countrymen

John the Madman

The Enchanting Houri

Behind the Garment

Dead Are My People

The Ambitious Violet

The Crucified

Eventide of the Feast

The Grave Digger

Honeyed Poison

SPIRITS REBELLIOUS

Madame Rose Hanie

The Cry of the Graves

Kahlil the Heretic

THE BROKEN WINGS

Foreword

Silent Sorrow

The Hand of Destiny

Entrance to the Shrine

The White Torch

The Tempest

The Lake of Fire

Before the Throne of Death

Between Christ and Ishtar

The Sacrifice

The Rescuer

THE VOICE OF THE MASTER

part one

The Master and the Disciple

The Master's Journey to Venice

The Death of the Master

part two

The Words of the Master

Of Life

Of the Martyrs to Man's Law

Thoughts and Meditations

Of the First Look • Of the First Kiss • Of Marriage

Of the Divinity of Man

Of Reason and Knowledge

Of Music

Of Wisdom

Of Love and Equality

Further Sayings of the Master

The Listener

Love and Youth

Wisdom and I

The Two Cities

Nature and Man

The Enchantress

Youth and Hope

Resurrection

THOUGHTS AND MEDITATIONS

The Poet From Baalbek

The Return of the Beloved

Union

My Soul Preached to Me

The Sons of the Goddess and the Grandsons of the Monkeys

Decayed Teeth

Mister Gabber

In the Dark Night

The Silver-Plated Turn

Martha

Vision

Communion of Spirits

Under the Sun

A Glance at the Future

The Goddess of Fantasy

History and the Nation

The Speechless Animal

Poets and Poems

Among the Ruins

At the Door of the Temple

Narcotics and Dissecting Knives

The Giants

Out of Earth

O Night

Earth

Perfection

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

A Story of a Friend

Ashes of the Ages and Eternal Fire

A SELF-PORTRAIT

Gibran to His Father, April, 1904

To Jamil Malouf, 1908

To Ameen Guraieb, Feb. 12, 1908

To Nakhi Gibran, March 15, 1908

To Ameen Guraieb, March 28, 1908

To Nakhli Gibran, Sept. 27, 1910

To Yousif Howayek, 1911

From May Ziadeh, May 12, 1912

To Saleem Sarkis, Oct. 6, 1912

To Ameen Guraieb, Feb. 18, 1913

To May Ziadeh, undated

To Mikhail Naimy, Sept. 14, 1919

To Emil Zaidan, 1919

To Mikhail Naimy, 1920

To Mikhail Naimy, 1920

To Mikhail Naimy, Oct. 8, 1920

To Mikhail Naimy, May 24, 1920

To Mikhail Naimy, 1920

To Mikhail Naimy, 1920

To May Ziadeh, Nov. 1, 1920

To May Ziadeh, 1920

To Mikhail Naimy, Jan. 1, 1921

To Mikhail Naimy, 1921

To Mikhail Naimy, 1921

To Mikhail Naimy, 1921

To Mikhail Naimy, 1921

To Mikhail Naimy, 1921

To Mikhail Naimy, 1921

To Mikhail Naimy, 1922

To Mikhail Naimy, 1922

To Mikhail Naimy, 1922

To Emil Zaidan, 1922

To Mikhail Naimy, Aug. 11, 1923

To Mikhail Naimy, 1923

To Mikhail Naimy, 1923

To Mikhail Naimy, Sept. 7, 1924

To Mikhail Naimy, 1925

To Edmond Wehby, March 12, 1925

To May Ziadeh, 1925

To May Ziadeh, 1926

To May Ziadeh, 1928

To Mikhail Naimy, 1928

To Mikhail Naimy, March, 1929

To Mikhail Naimy, March 26, 1929

To Mikhail Naimy, May 22, 1929

To May Ziadeh, 1930

To May Ziadeh, 1930

From Felix Farris, 1930

To Felix Farris, 1930

MIRRORS OF THE SOUL

Edited by Joseph Sheban

Is It All Possible?

The Environment That Created Gibran

The Birthplace of Gibran

Words of Caution

Gibran's Dual Personality

Gibran's Painting and Poetry

The Philosophy of Gibran

“Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You”

Solitude and Seclusion

The Sea

Handful of Beach Sand

The Sayings of the Brook

For Heaven's Sake, My Heart!

The Robin

The Great Sea

Seven Reprimands

During a Year Not Registered in History

The Women in the Life of Gibran

THE WISDOM OF KAHLIL GIBRAN

IMAGE GALLERY

PREFACE

K
AHLIL
Gibran is a delight and a surprise and a thoroughly contemporary spiritual guide, and
The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran
represents the most comprehensive volume of his works available. Translated and edited by a noted trio of Gibran scholars—Martin L. Wolf, Anthony R. Ferris and Andrew Dib Sherfan—the ten books included in this collectors' volume comprise the major body of Kahlil Gibran's canon.

This enriching collection of his stories, prose poems, personal letters, essays, parables and aphorisms paints an intimate portrait of the man far better than any biography. His writings reflect the wistful beauty and the abiding peace that Eastern wisdom achieves. Yet the author of
The Prophet
sensed the challenge of the old conformity versus the new awakening in the Middle East of his day with startling clarity, and his literary search for beauty and truth led him to stand up against the injustices in his homeland.

For starters, Gibran seems to have understood and cared about women's rights despite the fact that he was a man born in the late 19
th
century. Perhaps his passionate advocacy is a result of his close relationship to his strong and caring mother Kamila and to Mary Haskell, his Boston patron and much loved lifelong friend who sent him to Paris to study art. As a child, he'd witnessed the despair of women trapped in loveless arranged marriages in Syria.

Several of his parables in this wondrous collection illustrate the tragic plight of young Middle Eastern women, who have been forced by their families to marry rich, older men. If a young girl rebels and runs away to be with the impoverished young man whom she loves, the woman is cursed and reviled as a whore. Even worse, in Gibran's parable "The Bride's Bed" (based on a true story), the sorrowing young bride named Lyla kills her young beloved Saleem in the garden under a willow tree just hours after she marries her rich old husband surrounded by feasters who soon transform the gay wedding celebration into a coarse and profane orgy of drunkenness. Poor Lyla realizes she had been deceived when she was told her handsome young true love loved another. After killing her young man under the willow tree, she lifts her dagger toward the sky and plants it in her bosom.

Gibran was banished from Lebanon and excommunicated from the Catholic Church as a very young man when he published this account because he ended the tale with a description of a priest's contempt for the bloody young woman and her beloved. The priest shouted to the horrified wedding guests, "Cursed are the hands that touch these blood-spattered carcasses that are soaked with sin... Disperse now, before the flames of hell sting you, and he who remains here shall be cursed and excommunicated from the Church and shall never again enter the temple and join the Christians in offering prayers to God!"

In another parable called "Madam Rose Hanie," he writes passionately of a similar tragedy also set in Lebanon, in which the deserted bridegroom Rashid Bey Namaan becomes bitter, wrinkled and keenly distressed. Nonetheless, once again Gibran sympathizes more with the unhappy young wife:

In the Maronite church, in certain ceremonies, the whole congregation participates, chanting in Syriac, the language Christ spoke. The effect of the Maronite ceremonies remained with Gibran the rest of his life; a letter he wrote in later years acknowledged his debt to the church.

But Gibran does also feel sorry for the miserable rich bridegroom. Gibran had known Rashid Bey Namaan since childhood. Now bitterly suffering, Namaan tells Gibran that he rescued his young beautiful wife from deathly poverty, and made her envied by all other woman for her precious jewels, clothing and magnificent carriages. Why would she betray him to live with another man?

Next Gibran visits the beautiful and sincere Madame Rose Hanie, living in a wretched hovel. He asks himself, can this beautiful face hide an ugly soul and a criminal heart? She tells Gibran, "her voice sweeter than the sound of a lyre," that when she was eighteen her much older husband married her and exhibited her triumphantly to his friends. She tells Gibran she is not, as people say, an adulteress, heretic and prostitute.

Here Gibran asserts one of his quarrels with organized religion. Madame Rose Hanie spells out Gibran's belief:

In God's eyes I was unfaithful and an adulteress only while at the home of Rashid Bey Namaan, because he made me his wife according to the customs and traditions and by the force of haste, before heaven had made him mine in conformity with the spiritual law of Love and Affection...Now I am pure and clean because the law of Love has freed me and made me honorable and faithful.

BOOK: Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran
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