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
KAHLIL 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 a
phorisms 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 19th 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.
Millions of people know The Prophet, Gibran's uplifting work that is the best-selling book of poetry of the 20th century. It is still quoted in wedding ceremonies, Alcoholics Anonymous writings, and other moments of high emotion. The quote that AA uses is wonderful: "You pray in your distress and in your need: would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy."
This wide-ranging volume The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran is more varied and comprehensive than The Prophet and thus gives us a multi-faceted view of this gifted, spiritual, free-thinking, tortured and generous man. Letters to his friends and loved ones reveal personal details that infuse the legend with humanity: his excitement about going to Paris for a year to be among great artists, "the beginning of a new chapter in the story of my life"; the exhaustion of keeping up his necessary pace of writing and painting when his health was suffering; his humility as he asks a friend to forget and forgive an unmentioned transgression; the shy sweetness of his asking May Ziadeh, a Lebanese girl whom Gibran knew only through correspondence, "if you would like to talk to this man in the tongue he speaks, which you can understand better than anyone else." He confesses not to know how to ask her for her picture!
In another letter to May in 1925, soon after the publication of The Prophet, Gibran describes a very modern dilemma for a famous person who has lost the peace of anonymity:
A year ago I was living in peace and tranquility, but today my tranquility has turned into clamor and my peace into strife. The people devour my days and my nights and submerge my life in their conflicts and desires. Many a time I have fled from this awful city [New York] to a remote place to be away from the people and from the shadow of myself.
With this in mind, one of my favorite examples of his paradoxically practical and poetic sayings is this gem: "In battling evil, excess is good; for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth. He conceals the other half out of fear of the people's wrath."
Another favorite of mine reveals his quest for personal honesty. He humbly writes, "I use hate as a weapon to defend myself; had I been strong, I would never have needed that kind of a weapon."
Gibran's inspirational message in The Prohpet is relevant here. If he had not suffered poverty and dislocation as a child, we would not have his profound writings. The Prohpet has helped millions of readers gain peace of mind because, as Gibran explained, the book teaches that we are greater than we know, and things are a lot better than we think.
Not that the world isn't filled with injustice, and Gibran's lyrical words especially soar when he writes about cruelty and injustice. In "The Cry of the Graves" we see the courtroom of the Emir as he passes deadly final judgment on three people accused and immediately convicted as a murderer, an adulteress and a thief. The narrator contemplates what he has seen, and further, goes to the place where the executed bodies have been thrown, wondering:
Three human beings, who yesterday were in the lap of Life, today fell as victims to Death because they broke the rules of human society. When a man kills another man, the people say he is a murderer, but when the Emir kills him, the Emir is just. When a man robs a monastery, they say he is a thief, but when the Emir robs him of his life, the Emir is honourable. ... Shedding of blood is forbidden, but who made it lawful for the Emir? ... What is Law? Who saw it coming with the sun from the depths of heaven? What human saw the heart of God and found its will or purpose?
The narrator learns the truth about each of the three victims as their loved ones come to mourn them: the murderer killed an attempted rapist in self-defense; the adulteress was a young girl married against her will by her father, whose husband found her during an innocent meeting with the boy she loved since childhood; the thief was a poor farmer whose five starving children cried for food, driving him to steal a bushel of wheat from the monastery where he had worked the fields until they dismissed him. And as the narrator considers the graves before him, he feels "as if the earth that enfolded the victims of oppression in that lonely place were filling my ears with sorrowful tunes of suffering souls, and inspiring me to talk."
Gibran proceeded to talk, to paint, to write, to represent the truth and fight for justice—inspiring his readers, generation after generation, to change. Most amazing is how much he moves us still. Gibran wrote that you can find in one drop of water all the secrets of all the oceans; it follows that in every person there can be found all aspects of existence. There is no place for injustice in that world.
Susan Braudy
New York, New York 2011
TIMELINE
1883
Gibran is born on January 6th to a poor Maronite family in Besharri, a town in what is now northern Lebanon near the famed "Cedars of Lebanon." At the time, Lebanon was a Turkish province under Ottoman rule.
1885
Birth of sister Marianna.
1887
Birth of sister Sultana.
1895
Gibran's father is jailed on charges of graft and his family is left homeless; Gibran, mother Kamila, half-brother Butros, and two sisters emigrate to Boston in the US, leaving his father behind. Kamila makes a living as a peddlar until Butros opens a small shop and supports the family while Kahlil goes to school.
1896
Gibran shows talent in drawing classes. Meets Boston art photographer Fred Holland Day, who has a significant artistic impact on Gibran.
1897
Gibran returns to Lebanon to continue his Arabic-language education; attends Madrasat-al-Hikmah high school in Beirut, including classes in religion, ethics, Arabic and French languages and literature.
1902
Gibran returns to Boston. He loses his sister Sultana and brother Butros to tuberculosis, and his mother Kamila to cancer in the same year.
1904
Holds a picture exhibit at Fred Holland Day's studio. Meets Mary Haskell, an American school head mistress who begins to support Gibran financially and with his writing in English: she will spend hours with Gibran going over his wording, correcting his mistakes and suggesting new ideas to his writings; their friendship will endure for Gibran's lifetime.
1905
Gibran publishes in Arabic a small pamphlet on "Music" and begins to publish his prose poems in the al-Muhajir ("The Emigrant") newspaper.
1906
Publishes Spirit Brides in New York in Arabic. This collection of three short stories reflects his fascination with the Bible, the mystical, the injustice of religious persecution and the nature of love. Begins to get the attention of expatriate Arab intellectuals.