Kahlil Gibran

The Ghost of Kahlil Gibran

Last Sunday, I had about 20 minutes to kill before my Ultimate Frisbee game, so I stopped by Borders to do a few minutes of aimless browsing. I noticed a new addition to the poetry shelf published by Everyman’s Library. Everyman’s Library is a subdivision of Randomhouse and boasts the motto, “With 100 volumes, a man may be intellectually, rich.” Of course, this motto made more sense back in 1906 at the publisher’s founding when 100 volumes would only cost 5 pounds, and would, thus, be available to every man. Now, however, it costs $2,219.45 for 100 volumes, meaning that you need first to be financially rich before you can be intellectually rich. Still, I do trust their selection of the best books by the best authors. The particular Everyman’s volume that caught my eye on this afternoon was “The Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran.”

I cracked open the book to a random page and was immediately taken by Gibran’s style and content. In the first chapter of The Prophet, the mysterious title character is asked by the townspeople to describe the nature of love to which he replies:

…Even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning…

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast….

But if you fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

Whoa.

In other chapters, the Prophet expounds upon marriage, work, joy, good and evil, law, freedom, friendship, and self-knowledge. This book is perfect for me! I wondered how I didn’t find it sooner. Indeed, I often peruse the poetry shelves at bookstores and I had never once noticed the name Kahlil Gibran. Given my fascination with religiously and ethically themed poetry, I suppose it was destiny that Mr. Gibran and I crossed paths eventually.

Only, upon learning that the book was priced at $30.00, I decided that destiny would have to wait for another day, and placed the book back on the shelf. I figured I could find a cheaper soft-cover online or at the local used book store another day.

With instant gratification temporarily postponed, I attempted to sate my curiosity by doing some research on the author, which is something I never do. Much to my surprise, I discovered that Kahlil Gibran is the third best selling poet of all-time, behind only Lao Tzu and Shakespeare! It’s practically a miracle that we didn’t run into one another until now.

Gibran was born in Bsharri in the mountains of Greater Syria (presently Northern Lebanon) to a Maronite family. The Maronites are a Christian sect that traces its roots back to ancient city of Antioch, which was the original seat of the Christian Church under the patriarch Peter the Apostle. Years later, when the Muslim’s came through, the Christians in Antioch had a choice to make: create a political alliance with the Pope and, thus, garner military protection from the Church in Rome or remain independent and face possible Muslim conquest alone. Those that re-aligned themselves with Roman Catholics came to be the Maronite Church, while those that remained independent become the Syrian Orthodox Church. Gibran owes his upbringing to the former, while I owe mine to the latter.

I also learned that when Gibran immigrated to America as a young boy in 1895, he lived in Boston’s South End, which was then home to Boston College, my undergraduate alma mater. Not only that. Gibran had a long love affair, if seemingly one-directional, with a woman named Mary Haskell, to whom he had written innumerable letters. She held onto the letters and her diaries from the time even after her relocation to Savannah, GA and well into old age. She would bequeath the entire collection to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, just down the street from where I presently live. Strange.

But that’s not all. I also learned that Gibran had two schools named after him, both in New York. One school, which has come under some scrutiny, is located in a Lebanese enclave in Brooklyn where they teach all the students Arabic. The other school is in Yonkers, NY, which has an insignificant number of Lebanese immigrants, if any. Of course, the more immediate connection to Yonkers is that it is the town in which I was born and raised. Very Strange.

I google mapped the school and it turns out that not only is it in my hometown, not only is it in my particular neighborhood, but just as with the other parallels in this post, it, too, is just down the street from where I once lived. I called my dad to ask him if he remembered a school named Kahlil Gibran Elementary in our neighborhood and described its location in relation to our old home. He said, “Yeah, that’s where you went to second grade.” What?

I looked into this, and it is, indeed, where I went to second grade. Only, then it was called Public School 28, or PS 28, according to the primitive school naming system of New York in the 1980’s. Apparently, I went to Kahlil Gibran Elementary. Bizarre. This guy has been coming to get me all my life!


Wisdom: 98¢ of Best Offer

I ended up finding a few Kahlil Gibran books at a local used book store. I’m amazed at how affordable used books can be. Rather than fork over $30.00 for the new copy of Gibran’s collected works at Borders, I was able to buy 6 of Gibran’s books at the used book store for $13, including one that isn’t in his collected works.

The hardcover copy of The Prophet I ended up finding cost 98 cents. Ninety-Eight Cents!

Think about that. Some celebrated author writes down everything he knows about the nature of love and work and God and friendship and marriage and good and evil and that’s the resale value! Less than a dollar! Wisdom comes that cheaply!

Meanwhile, if I wanted to buy Zombie Nation, which IMDB ranks as the worst movie of all time, I would have to spend $12.99 at Amazon. What value do these things have for a man? An economist would say that Zombie Nation is 13 times more valuable to a man than The Prophet, as evidenced by all relevant market factors. Then again, I never cared much for economists.


All in the Timing

This past weekend, a grad school friend was in town for a visit. The last time she was in town, she took me to the above mentioned used book store for the first time. I have since become a big fan of the store.

While we were in grad school together, this same friend mentioned that I might like the writings of Rumi. I looked into it at the time, but didn’t care much for him then. Recently, however, I re-discovered Rumi and I now find him to be an incredibly insightful writer.

In contrasting the spirit and the body, Rumi writes:

Don’t feed both sides of yourself equally.
The spirit and the body carry different loads
And require different attentions.
Too often
We put saddlebags on Jesus and let the donkey
Run loose in the pasture.
Don’t make the body do
What the spirit does best, and don’t put a big load
On the spirit that the body could easily carry.

Elsewhere, he comments on love:

The way of love is not A subtle argument. The door there Is devastation. Birds make great sky-circles Of their freedom. How do they learn that? They fall, and falling,
They’re given wings.

There is definitely a thematic parallel between Rumi and Gibran. Indeed, Rumi wrote “wheat remains wheat through the threshing,” which is certainly pointedly evocative of Gibran’s description of love in The Prophet, or vice versa. I suspect that Gibran drew inspiration from Rumi.

Two things occur to me.

First, a person’s appreciation for literature is so intimately tied to where they are in life at the time. I can make a library of all the fine literature that was wasted on me in my high school days, before I had developed any sort of palate for anything worldly. Indeed, I may today have a greater appreciation for Joyce and Faulkner if I hadn’t had the misfortune of first attempting to approach them with 16 year old eyes. I am certainly thankful that I did not discover the likes of Rumi, Kabir, and Gibran until after I turned 25. I’m curious to learn what it will be like at 50 to happen upon an upturned rock and have my eyes alight upon an old literary treasure for the first time. Will it feel just like this? Or does this sensation improve with age?

Second, if I am truly haunted by the ghost of Kahlil Gibran, it stands to reason that the ghost might wait until I first learned to appreciate Rumi before he revealed himself to me. Granted, I would genuinely be surprised if ghosts really do exist in this manner. However, if ghosts do exist, it would come as no surprise to me that I am haunted by an early 20th century Lebanese-American mystical poet. All in all, that actually sounds eerily plausible.