Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran (75 page)

1930

Dear May:

… My health at present is worse than it was at the beginning of the summer. The long months which I spent between the sea and the country have prolonged the distance between my body and my spirit. But this strange heart that used to quiver more than one hundred times a minute is now slowing down and is beginning to go back to normal after having ruined my health and affected my well-being. Rest will benefit me in a way, but the doctor's medicines are to my ailment as the oil to the lamp. I am in no need for the doctors and their remedies, nor for rest and silence. I am in dire need for one who will relieve me by lightening my burden. I am in need of a spiritual remedy—for a helpful hand to alleviate my congested spirit. I am in need of a strong wind that will fell my fruits and my leaves.

… I am, May, a small volcano whose opening has been closed. If I were able today to write something great and beautiful, I would be completely cured. If I could cry out, I would gain back my health. You may say to me, “Why don't you write in order to be cured; and why don't you cry out in order to gain back your health?” And my answer is: I don't know. I am unable to shout, and this is my very ailment; it's a spiritual ailment whose symptoms have appeared in the body … You may ask again, “Then what are you doing for this ailment, and what will be the outcome, and how long are you going to remain in this plight?” And I say to you that I shall be cured, and I shall sing my song and rest later, and I shall cry out with a loud voice that will emanate from the depth of my silence. Please, for God's sake, don't tell me, “You have sung a lot, and what you have already sung was beautiful.” Don't mention to me my past deeds, for the remembrance of them makes me suffer, and their triviality turns my blood into a burning fire, and their dryness generates thirst in my heart, and their weakness keeps me up and down one thousand and one times a day. Why did I write all those articles and stories? I was born to live and to write a book—only one small book—I was born to live and suffer and to say one living and winged word, and I cannot remain silent until Life utters that word through my lips. I was unable to do this because I was a prattler. It's a shame, and I am filled with regret because I remained a chatterbox until my jabbering weakened my strength. And when I became able to utter the first letter of my word, I found myself down on my back with a stone in my mouth … However, my word is still in my heart, and it is a living and a winged word which I must utter in order to remove with its harmony the sins which my jabbering has created.

The torch must come forth.

G
IBRAN

When Felix Farris, a prominent Lebanese writer, heard about his beloved Gibran's illness, he felt so bad that he forgot about his own illness, and wrote to Gibran the letter which follows. Gibran's answer is next included.

FROM FELIX FARRIS

1930

… Gibran, my seeing you ill was more painful to me than my own illness. Come let us go to the native land of the body and enliven it there. When the tempest of pain strikes a person, the body longs for its earth and the soul for its substance.

Come, my brother, let us discard what is broken, and fly away with the unbroken to the place where silence lives. There is a longing in my heart for you like the longing for the place in which I left my heart. There in Beirut, at the harbor, my eyes shall focus upon the heart of the Holy Cedars, the paradise of my country. With you by me, Gibran, my soul would look at its eternal Cedars as if it were on the shore of the true Universe. Let us triumph and remedy our ailments. This civilization which has tired you after many years, has exausted me many months ago. Come, let us withdraw and exploit our suffering under the shade of the Cedars and the pine trees, for there we shall be closer to the earth and nearer to heaven…. My eyes are anxious to see the dust of the earth and all that is within it of importance in the hidden world.

Believe me, Gibran, I have not seen a blooming flower, nor have I smelled an aromatic scent, nor heard the singing of a nightingale, nor felt the passing of a frolicsome breeze since the last time my eyes saw the Orient, your home and mine.

Come, let us awaken the dormant pains—come and let the pure skies of your country hear your beautiful songs, and let your brush and pen draw from the original what you are drawing now from the prints of memory.

F
ELIX
F
ARRIS

TO FELIX FARRIS

1930

My dear Felix,

… It is not strange that we are both struck by the same arrow at the same time. Pain, my brother, is an unseen and powerful hand that breaks the skin of the stone in order to extract the pulp. I am still at the mercy of the doctors and I shall remain subject to their weights and measures until my body rebels against them or my soul revolts against my body. Mutiny shall come in the form of surrender and surrender in the form of mutiny; but whether I rebel or not, I must go back to Lebanon, and I must withdraw myself from this civilization that runs on wheels. However, I deem it wise not to leave this country before I break the strings and chains that tie me down; and numerous are those strings and those chains! I wish to go back to Lebanon and remain there forever.

G
IBRAN

MIRRORS
OF THE SOUL

MIRRORS OF THE SOUL

IS IT ALL POSSIBLE?

K
AHLIL GIBRAN
was born in the shadow of the holy Cedars of Lebanon but spent the mature years of his life within the shadows of the skyscrapers of New York. Gibran has been described as The Mystic, The Philosopher, The Religious, The Heretic, The Serene, The Rebellious and The Ageless. Is it possible to accumulate all these contradictory characteristics in one man?

Is it possible for some to burn his books because they are “dangerous, revolutionary and poisonous to youth,” while others, at the same moment, are writing: “Gibran, at times, achieves Biblical majesty of phrase. There are echoes of Jesus and echoes of the Old Testament in his words.”

One of Gibran's books,
The Prophet,
alone has been on the international best-seller lists for forty years; it has sold more than a million and a half copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

The Prophet
is Gibran's best work in English, but
The Broken Wings,
his first novel, is considered his best in Arabic. It has been on the international best-seller list longer than
The Prophet.

Biographers of Gibran, to date, have been his personal friends and acquaintances; they have thus been unable to separate his work from his personal life. They have written only of what they had seen of the Gibran with whom they lived; they were concerned only with the frailties of his life. Biographers, until now, have not tried to explain why the Gibran family migrated to America or to explain the effect of such a migration upon Gibran's work, upon his revolutionary thought or upon his mysticism.

Gibran revolted against law, religion and custom. He advocated a society peaceful and mystical; but the world lacks the procedures and the formulae through which man can discard his present social orders to move into a Utopia full of love and eternal happiness.

Gibran wrote in two languages: Arabic for Lebanon, Syria and the Arabic world; English for the West. His admirers have translated his Arabic works into English, his English works into Arabic. Often, however, the translations have been like transporting an automobile to a country without roads or like training a horse to travel highways and expressways. To understand and justify some of Gibran's writing, a reader must study the unusual environment which influenced the dual Gibran. For example, his biographers have stated that he was exiled from Lebanon, but they have failed to explain that the Lebanese government did not expel Gibran. It was the Turkish Sultan who feared the rebellious Gibran and the introduction of modern Western ideas and Western methods of government into the Arab world which would accelerate the rebellion which was already fermenting agains Turkish rule in the Middle East.

THE ENVIRONMENT THAT
CREATED GIBRAN

E
VEN
BEFORE
the birth of Gibran, many men had fled from Syria and Lebanon, some settling in Egypt, some in America, others in Europe. Those who were not lucky enough to escape or to be exiled were hanged in the public squares as examples to those who might have been tempted to revolt against the Sultan.

Turkey had conquered Syria as early as the year 1517, over 350 years before Gibran was born (1883). However, the mountains of Lebanon were too treacherous to be assaulted by the Turkish army; hence, Turkey occupied the seashore and the plains and left the mountains and their stubborn inhabitants in control of their own government under the supervision of an agent appointed by Turkey, providing that they paid taxes to the treasury of the Sultans.

The French Revolution

One of the ramifications of the French Revolution in 1789, nearly a century before the birth of Gibran, was the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. Many of these religious were accepted, as refugees, in Lebanon.

The Christians of Lebanon are predominantly Maronites, who are Catholics with extraordinary privileges, which are traditions preserved from the early practices of the Church. The Patriarch, the head of the church in Lebanon, is authorized to appoint bishops, an authority which, of course, is not granted to even Cardinals in the Roman Rite. The Maronite Church uses Syriac, or Aramaic, in its liturgy, the same language spoken by Christ. A Maronite priest may marry. Gibran's mother was the daughter of a Maronite priest, educated in Arabic and French because the Jesuits who had settled permanently in Lebanon had opened schools and taught the French language and Western history, which had not been available in Arabic since the Turks took over three hundred years earlier.

The Sultans, Beautiful Women and Taxes

Turkey was once one of the mightiest nations on earth; it controlled all of the Arab World, North Africa and a great part of Europe. Proud of its military might, Turkey granted its army one-third of the spoils of war. The Sultan, according to law, owned the Empire. In return for good service or for a favor the Sultan was able to bestow an estate upon many of his subjects. This practice recreated and revitalized the feudal system in the Empire. All this favor and practice did not induce the Arab world to become a part of the Turkish Empire; local uprisings and small rebellions continued for many years. In 1860 Youssif Bey Karam, a member on the maternal side of this writer's family and from Gibran's district, led a great revolution for the independence of Lebanon. Although lacking manpower and ammunition, he out-maneuvered and defeated the Turkish Army in several engagements. In the end, however, the revolution failed.