Kahlil Gibran Essay

But Gibran was primarily a poet and a mystic in whom thought, as in either sound poet and good mystic, is a suppose of being quite an than a call shoot of mind. A educatee of Gibrans philosophy, wherefore, finds himself to a great extent come to non with his ideas al peerless with his disposition non with his theory of adore hardly with Gibran the l over. That Gibran had started his literary biography as a Lebanese emigrant in America, black marketionately yearning for his homeland, twentieth-century and intellectual may, perhaps progress a introductory clue to his disposition frame prep be. To be an emigrant is to be an alien.But to be an emigrant mystical aberration is added poet is to be thrice alienated. To geographical from both conventional gracious society at full-size, and estrange workforcet excessively the whole service cosmos of spatio-temporal existence. Therefore such a poet is gripped by a triple longing a longing for the country of his birth, for a utopian gentlemans gentleman society of the imagination in which he tail endside feel at home, and for a higher gentlemans gentleman of metaphysical truth. This Gibran with the basis for his artistic creatitriple longing provided vity. Its ontogenesis from sensation distributor point of his work to an a nonher(prenominal)(a) is solitary(prenominal) a variation in emphasis and non in variety show three strings of his harp re al guidances to be detected and towards the block of his bearing they achieve * Al-Majm? ah al K? milahli Mu in solelyaf? t Gibr? nKhal? lGibr? n,Beirut 1949-50 Sand and Foam, stark naked York 1926 ThePropbet, New York 1923 The Forerunner,New York 1920 deliveryman the Sonof Man, New York 1928 The flat coat graven images,New York 1931 1 TheProphet, 33. p. 56 almost perfect accord in his master- small-arm, The Prophet, where the home country of the prophesier Al essentialafa, the utopian state of piece existence and the metaphysical unive rse of talk of of higher truth get d stimulate wiz and the comparable.To The Prophet as well as to the relaxation of Gibrans workings, Music fire be considered as a prelude. Published el plane geezerhood after Gibrans emigration to Boston as a youth of el charge, this demonstrate of about thirteen pages marks the authors debut into the factualism of letters. though entitled Music, this sacred scripturelet is more of a schoolboys prosaic ode to on it. As such, it tells us more music than an objective dissertation about Gibran, the emotional boy, than about his subject.The Gibran it reveals is a flowery senti workforcetalist who, staring(a) with a vague sees in music a floating sister- feel, an ethitheral nostalgic sadness, of all that a nostalgic stub is non and yet yearns to be. embodiment of the whole essay, both in style and in spirit, is the Representative following quotation, in which he addresses music Oh you, wine of the heart that uplifts its drinker to the he ights of the world of imagination-you ethereal waves bearing the souls phantoms you sea of sensibility and tenderness to your waves we lend our soul, and to your finis depths we trust our hearts.Carry those hearts a charge beyond the world of occasion and show us what is unfathomed deep in the world of the unkn throw. Between Mztsic of 1905 and The Prophet of 1923, Gibrans writings as well as his thought seem to invite passed through two stages the youthful period of his early Arabic works, Nymphs of the Wally, spirit Rebellious, low-spirited Wings and A Tear and a Smile, published between 1907 and 1914, and the relatively more maturate stage of Processions, The Tempests, The Madman, his first work in English, and The Forerunner, his second, all leading up to The Prophet.It is scarce natural that in his youthful stage Gibrans longing in Chinatown, Boston, where he first isthmustled, for Lebanon, the country of the first easy years of his sustenance sentence, should domi nate the two other strings in his harp. Nymphs of the Vallg is a collection of three pathetic stories Spirits Rebellious consists of some other four, dapple Broken traces and Wings can easily pass for a long light level. Overlooking dates, the three books can safely be considered as virtuoso volume of eight collected short stories that argon similar in both style and conception, even to the point of redundancy in all of them Lebanon, as the unique 1 See al M? ? qa al-Majm? ah in al-K? milah (The Complete Works), vol. I, p. 57. 57 of mystic natural beauty, provides the setting. The different heroes, though their names and situations vary from story to story, are Khalil Gibran in essence hotshot and the same. They are un mistakably the youth himself, who at times does non even bother to conceal his identity, addressing in the first person singular in Broken Wings and as Khalil in Khalil the Heretic of Spirits Rebellious. This first-person hero is typically to be found thoug ht-provoking pretenders to the possession of the body and soul of his be get byd Lebanon.These pretenders in the nineteenth and early twentieth century are, in Gibrans reckoning, the feudal lords of Lebanese aristocracy and the church order. The stories are therefore almost invariably distort in such a way as to bring Gibran the hero, or a Gibran-modelled hero, into direct combat with of angiotensin converting enzyme or another of those groups. representatives In Broken Wings, Gibran the youth and Salma Karameh fall in venerate. But the local anesthetic archbishop frustrates their love by forcibly marrying Salma to his nephew. and then Gibran finds the opportunity, whilst his love of the virgin beauty of Lebanon, to pour out his singing anger on the church and its hierarchy. In Spirits Rebellious, Iihalil the heretic is expelled from a monastery in Mount Lebanon into a raging winter blizzard, because he was too Christian to be tolerated by the abbot and his fellow monks. carr y through at the last moment by a widow and her beautiful daughter in a Lebanese hamlet and secretly given(p) refuge in their bungalow, he soon makes the mother an takeoff booster of his ideals of a primitive anticlerical Christianity and the daughter a disciple and a devoted lover.When he is discovered and captured by the local feudal lord and brought to trial before him as a heretic and an outlaw, he stands among the multitudes of low-down Lebanese villagers and tenants and speaks alike(p) a Christ at his second flood tide. Won over by his defence, which he turns into an offensive over against the allied despotism of the church and the feudal system, the simple and poverty-stricken villagers rally round him. As a consequence the local lord commits suicide, the priest takes to flight, Khalil marries the daughter of his rescuer, and the whole village lives ever afterward in a blissful state of natural piety, amity and on the dotice. bum the Madman in Nymphs of the vale is almost a duplicate of Khalil the heretic. Detained with his calves by the abbot and monks of a monastery simply because the calves puzzle intruded on its property, John, the woeful calf-keeper, accuses his persecutors and all other men of the church of being the enemies of Christ, the modern pharisees land 58 on the poverty, ill and goodness of the very good deal prospering like himself in whom Christ abides. Come forth again, o living out of your Christ, he calls, and chase these religion-merchants For they have turned those temples into dungeons where the temples. nakes of their cunning and villainy lie coiled. 1 Because he was brotherly order uniinspired with sincere truth under a domineering to sincerity and truth, John was push aside as a formly antagonistic madman. It is easy to label Gibran in this early stage of his career as a accessible reformer and a ascend, as he was indeed labelled by many students of his works in the Arab world. His heroes, whose main weapons are their eloquent tongues, are always engaged in struggles that are of a affectionate nature.There are almost invariably three detailors here guiltless romantic love, frustrated by a society that subjugates love to worldly selfish interests, a church order that claims wealth, big businessman and infinite authority in the name of Christ but is in fact utterly antichrist, and a ruthlessly inhuman feudal system. However, in spite of the apparent climate of social uprising in his stories Gibran remains farthermost from deserving the title of social reformer. To be a reformer in revolt against something is to be in possession of a positive utility(a).But nowhere do Gibrans heroes strike us as having any real alternative. The alternatives, if any, are nonentity but the negation of what the heroes revolt against. Thus their alternative for a corrupt love is no corrupt love, the sort of utopian love that we are made to see in Broken Lf/ings the alternative for a feudal system is no feudal system, or the kind of systemless society we end up with in Spirits Rebellious and the alternative for a Christless church is a Christ without any kind of church, madman in the kind of role in which John has found himself. Not being in possession of an alternative, a social reformer in revolt is instantly transformed from a hero into a social misfit. Thus Gibrans heroes have invariably been heretics, madmen, wanderers, and even prophets and paragons. As such they all Boston, drawn represent Gibran the emigrant misfit in Chinatown, in his imagination and longing to Lebanon, his childhoods fairyland, who is not so much concerned with the ills that corrupt its society as with the corrupt society that defiles its beauty.What kind of Lebanon Gibran has in mind bewilders clearer in a relatively late essay in Arabic, in which his ideal of Lebanon and that of the antagonists whom he portrays in his stories are set against i another. vol. 1 Al-Majm? ahal-K? mila, I, p. 101. 59 T he best that Gibran the rebel could tell those corrupters of Lebanese society in this essay entitled You Have Your Lebanon and I have Mine is not how to make Lebanon a better society, but how beautiful is Lebanon without any society at all.He writes You have your Lebanon and its problems, and I have my Lebanon and its beauty. You have your Lebanon with all that it has of various interests and concerns, while I have my Lebanon with all that it has of aspirations and dreams Your Lebanon is a political riddle that time to resolve, while my Lebanon is hills rising in awe and attempts Your Lebanon is ports, industry majesty towards the blue sky and commerce, while my Lebanon is a far removed idea, a burning emotion, and an ethereal word whispered by humanity into the ear of promised land Your Lebanon is religious sects and parties, while my Lebanon is youngsters climbing rocks, running with rivulets and ball in open squares. Your Lebanon is speeches, lectures and playing while my Leb anon is songs of nightingales, discussions, swaying branches of oak and poplar, and echoes of shepherd flutes reverber1 ating in caves and grottoes. It is no wonder that this kind of rebel should wind up his so-called social revolt at this stage of his career with the publication of a book of collected prose meters entitled A Tear and a Smile.The tears, which are much more abundant here than the smiles, are those of Gibran the misfit rather than of the rebel in Boston, singing in an exceedingly touching way of his frustrated love and estrangement, his loneliness, homesickness and melancholy. The smiles, on the other hand, are the expression of those hitherto intermittent but now more numerous moments in the career of Gibran the emigrant when the land of mystic beauty, ceases to be a geographical Lebanon, in his imagination into expression, and is gradationally metamorphosed a metaphysical After such rudimentary as his homeland. ttempts short story The Ash of Generations and the Eternal heighten in Nymphs Gibran has of the Valley, expressive of his belief in reincarnation, managed in his prose poems of A Tear and a Smile to give his homesickness a clear platonic twist. His aberration has become that of the human soul entrapped in the foreign world of physical existence, and his homesickness has become the yearning of the soul so estranged for rehabilitation in the higher world of metaphysical truth whence it has originally descended.It is for this reason that human sustenance is 1 ibidem , vol. III, pp. 202-203. 60 expressed by a tear and a smile a tear for the passing and alienation The historic analogy and a smile for the prospect of a home- approach. of the sea in this respect becomes third estate from now on in Gibrans writings rain is the weeping of water that falls over hills and dales from the mother sea, while running brooks sound the estranged Such is the soul, says Gibran in one of happy song of home-coming. rom the universal soul it takes its his prose poems. Separated course in the world of matter passing like a cloud over the mountains of sorrow and the plains of happiness until it is met by the breezes of death, whereby it is brought back to where it originally belongs, to the sea of love and beauty, to god. 1 When Gibrans homeland, the object of his longing, was Lebanon, his anger was directed against those who in his view had corrupt its beauty.But now that his homeland had gradually assumed a metaphysical Platonic significance, his attack was no longer centred on local influences clergy, church dogma, feudalism and the other corrupting in Lebanon, but rather on the shamefully defiled image that man, the emigrant in the world of physical existence, has made of the world of deity, his original homeland. Not only Lebanese society, but rather human society at large has become the main target of Gibrans the second stage of his career. isgust and cheekiness throughout This kind of rebuff constitutes the central authorship in Gibrans long Arabic poem Processions of 1919 and his book of collected Arabic essays The Tempests of 1920, his last work in Arabic, as well as in his first two works in English, The Madman of 1918, and The Forerunner of 1920, both of which are collected parables and prose poems. The hero in Gibrans poetico-fictional title- assemble in The Tempests, Youssof al-Fakhry in his cottage among the forbidding mountains, becomes a mystery to the awe-stricken Only to neighbourhood.Gibran the narrator, seeking refuge in the cottage one stormy evening, does he reveal the secret of his heroic silence and privacy. It is a certain alter in the uttermost depth of the soul, he says, a certain idea which takes a mans conscience by surprise at a moment and opens his vision whereby he sees life projecof forgetfulness, ted like a tower of light between earth and infinity. 2 Looking at the rest of men from the tower of life, from his giant divinity-self which he has so recognized at a rare moment of awakening, Youssof al-Fakhry sees them in their forgetful sidereal day-to-day earthly 1 ibid. vol. II, p. 95. 2 Ibid. , vol. III, p. 111. 61 to existence, at the can buoy of the tower. In their placid unwillingness lift their eyeball to what is divine in their natures, they appear to him as cruddy pigmies, hypocrites and cowards. I have deserted citizenry, he explains to his guest, because I have found myself a wind turning he right among wheels invariably turning left. No, my brother, adds, I have not sought seclusion for prayer or hermitic practices. Rather have I sought it in escape from people and their laws, article of beliefs and customs, from their ideas, noises and wailings.I have sought seclusion so as not to see the faces of men marketing their souls to buy with the price thereof what is below their souls in value and honour In The Grave-Digger, another poetico-fictional piece in The these men who have s older their souls, and who constitute in Te mpests, Gibrans reckoning the rest of human society, are dismissed as dead, though in the words of the hero, modelled in the lines of Youssof alFakhry, finding none to inter them, they remain on the face of the 2 earth in stinking disintegration.The heros advice to Gibran the narrator is that for a man who has awakened to his giant God-self the best service he can transform society is digging graves. From that hour up to the present, Gibran concludes, I have been digging graves and interment the dead, but the dead are many and I am alone with nobody to help me. 3 To be the only sane man among fools is to appear as the only fool among sane men.If life, as Youssof al-Fakhry says, is a tower whose bottom is the earth and whose top is the world of the infinite, then to clamour for the infinite in ones life is to be considered an outcast and a fool by the rest of men clinging to the bottom of the tower. This is first English work, The precisely how the Madman in Gibrans his title. His masks stolen, he was walking naked, as Madman, gained every traveller from the physical to the metaphysical is bound to be. Seeing his nakedness, someone on a house-top cried He is a madman. Looking up, the sun, his higher self, kissed his naked face for the first time. He fell in love with the sun and wanted his masks, his no longer. Thereafter he was always physical and social attachments, known as the Madman, and as a madman he was at war against human society. Processions, Gibrans long poem in Arabic, is a dialogue between two voices. Upon c abide analysis, the two voices seem to belong to one and 1 Ibid. , vol. III, 106. p. 2 Ibid. , vol. III, p. 11. 3 Ibid. , vol. III, 15. p. 62 the same man another of those Gibranian madmen, or men who have become Gods unto themselves.This man would at one time cast his at people living at the bottom of the tower, and eyes downwards raise his voice in jeering and sarcasm, poking fun at consequently their unreality, satirizing their Gods, cr eeds and practices, and ridiculing their values, ever doomed, blind as they are, to be at loggerheads. At another instant he would turn his eyes to his own sublime world beyond good and evil, where dualities interpenetrate giving way to unity, and then he would raise his voice in praise of life absolute and universal. is to achieve serenity and peace.That To achieve self-fulfilment Gibran and his heroes are nonoperational mad Gods, grave-diggers and enemies of mankind, filled with bitterness condescension their claim of having arrived at the crest of lifes tower, reveals that Gibrans self-fulfilment this second stage of his work is still a matter of wishful throughout rather than an accomplished fact. Too thinking and make-believe with his own inconvenienceful loneliness in his transcendental preoccupied quest, Gibran the madman or superman, it seems, has failed hitherto at the summit, but likewise to not only to feel the blessedness of self-realization recognize the ragedy of his fellow-men supposedly lost in the mire alternatively of love and compassion, down below. Consequently people could only inspire in him bitterness and disgust. The stage of anger and disgust was succeeded in Gibrans development by a third stage, that of The Prophet, his chef d? tlvre, saviour the Son of Man and The Earth Gods. The link is to be found in The Forerunner of 1920, his book of collected poems and parables. To believe, as Gibran did, that life is a tower whose base is earth and whose summit is the infinite is also to believe that life is one and indivisible.For the man on top of lifes tower to pass up those who are beneath, as Gibran had been doing up to this point, is to undermine his own height and become lower than the lowest he rejects. Thus one of Gibrans poems in The Forerunner says, as though in atonement for all his Nietzschean revolt Too young am I and too outraged to be my freer self. And how shall I become my freer self unless I slay my burdened selves, o r unless all men become free? How shall the shoot in me soar against the sun until my fledglings leave the nest which I with my own beak have strengthened for them. 1 1 TheForerunner,p. 7. 63 Gibrans belief in the unity of life, which has hitherto made only and at times confused appearances in his writings, has intermittent now become, with all its implications with regard to human life and conduct, the prevailing theme of the rest of his works. If life is one and infinite, then man is the infinite in embryo, just as a set is in itself the whole direct in embryo. either seed, says Gibran in one of his later works, is a longing. 1 This longing is presumably the longing of the tree in the seed for in the actual tree that it had previously been. Every self-fulfilment seed therefore bears within itself the longing, the self-fulfilment and the means by which this can be achieved. To transfer the analogy to man is to say that every man as a conscious being is a divine seed is life absolute and infinite in embryo. Every man, therefore, according to Gibran, is a longing the longing of the divine in man for man the divine whom he had previously been.But, to quote Gibran again, No longing remains unfulfilled. 2 wish the seed, he Therefore every man is destined for Godhood. bears within him the longing, the fulfilment which is God, and the road leading to this fulfilment. It is in this context that Gibran declares in The Forerurcner, You are your own forerunner, and the tower have built are but the foundations of your giant self. 3 you Seeing man in this light, Gibran can no longer afford to be a gravedigger. A new stage has opened in his career. Men are divine and, therefore, deathless.If they remain in the mire of their earthly existence, it is not because they are mean and disgusting, but because the divine in them, like the fire in a piece of wood, is dormant though it needs only a slight spark to be released into a inferno of light. it is not a grave-dig ger that men need, but an Consequently, a Socratic mid-wife, who would help man release the God in igniter himself into the self that is one with God. Therefore in this new stage Gibran the grave-digger and the madman gives way to Gibran the and the igniter. rophet In The Prophet of 1923, Almustafa who was a dawn unto his own day sees his ship, for which he had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese, returning to bear him back to the islet of his birth. The people of Orphalese leave their daily work and crowd around him in the city square to bid him leave and beg for something of his 1 Sandand Foam, p. 16. 1 Ibid. , p. 25. 1 TheForerunner,p. 7. 64 he answers their various before he leaves, whereupon knowledge on subjects of their own choosing. uestions It is not hard to see that Almustafa the Prophet is Gibran himself, who in 1923 had already spent almost twelve years in New York city, the city of Orphalese, having moved there from Boston in 1912, and that the isle of his bir th is Lebanon to which he had longed to return. But looking deeper still Almustafa can further symbolize the man who, in Gibrans reckoning, has become his freer self who has realized the passage in himself from the human to the divine, and is therefore ripe for emancipation and reunion with life absolute.His ship is death that has come to bear him to the isle of his birth, the Platonic world of metaphysical reality. As to the people of Orphalese, they stand for human society at large in which men, exiled in their spatio-temporal existence from their true selves, that is, from God, are in need in their God-ward journey of the guiding prophetic hand that would lead them from what is human in them to the divine. Having made that journey himself, Almustafa presents himself in his sermons the book as that croak. throughout Stripped of its poetical trappings, Gibrans teaching in TheProphet is found to rest on the single idea that life is one and infinite. As a living being, man in his te mporal existence is only a shadow of his real self. To be ones real self is to be one with the infinite to which man is related. Self-realization, therefore, lies in going out of inseparably ones spatio-temporal dimensions, so that the self is broadened to the mans only extent of including everyone and all things. Consequently in self-realization, to his greater self, lies in love. Hence love is the path theme of the opening sermon of Almustafa to the people of Orphalese.No man can say I truly without meaning the totality of things apart from which he cannot be or be conceived. Still less can one love oneself truly without loving everyone and all things. So love is at once an emancipation and a crucifixion an emancipation because it releases man from his narrow confinement and brings him to that whereby he feels one with the stage of broader self- brain with God a crucifixion because to grow into the broader self infinite, is to shatter the smaller self which was the seed and confin ement. For even as Thus true self-assertion is bound to be a self-negation. love crowns you, says Almustafa to his hearers, so shall he surmount 1 you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. 1 TheProphet, p. 15. 65 love, which is our guide to our larger self, is insepConsequently arable from pain. Your pain, says Almustafa, is the breaking of Even as the stone of the the shell that encloses your understanding. fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know 1 pain. Thus conceived, pain becomes at once a kind of joy.It is the joy of the seed dying as a tree in embryo in a process of becoming a tree in full. and neglected which is really painful. It is only pain misunderstood self is God, then anything that gives us pain is a receive If our larger that our self is not yet broad enough to contain it. For to contain all is is then an to be in love and at peace with all. Pain truly understood to growth and therefore to joy. Your joy, says A lmustafa, impetus is your sorrow unmasked. The deeper that sorrow carves into your 2 being, the more joy you can contain. If pain and joy are inseparable, so are life and death.In a universe that is infinite nothing can die except the finite, and nothing finite can be other than the infinite in disguise. terminal understood is the pouring of the finite into the infinite, the passage of the God in man into the man in God. disembodied spirit and death are one, says Almustafa, even as the And what is to cease breathing, but to river and the sea are one free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and 3 seek God unencumbered. If life and death are one even as joy and pain, it must follow that life is not the opposite of death nor death the opposite of life.For to live is to grow and to grow is to exist in a continuous process of dying. Therefore every death is a rebirth into a higher state of being, in the sense of the child is father to the man. Thus in a W ordsworthian reach of birth and rebirth man persists in his God-ward continuous of himself until ascent, gaining at each step a broader consciousness he finally ends at the absolute. It is a flame spirit in you, says Almustafa, ever gathering more of itself. 4 Similarly, nothing can happen to us which is not in fact self-invited, If God is our greater self, then nothing can and self-entertained. efall us from without. Says Almustafa 1 Ibid. , p. 60. 2 Ibid. , p. 35. 3 Ibid. , pp. 90-91. 4 Ibid. , p. 97. 66 The And And And murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder, the robbed is not blameless in being robbed. the righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked, the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon. 1 If God is our greater self then there can be no good in the infinite universe which is not the good of every man, nor can there be any homogeneous a procession, evil for which anyone can abjure responsibility.Almustafa, you walk together towards your Go d self. says even as the holy and righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you, so the wicked and the light-colored cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also. And as a single leaf turns not scandalmongering but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree, So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all. 22 It would follow that the spiritual elevation of a Christ is part and parcel of the material villainy of a Judas Iscariot. For in God Christ and Judas are one and inseparable.No man, therefore, no matter how elevated, can be emancipated into his larger self alone. An eagle, however high it can soar, is always bound to come down again to its fledgelings in the nest and is until they too become strong of wing, doomed to remain earthbound and the same is true of an elevated human soul or a prophet. So long as there remains even one speck of bestiality in any man no other human soul, no matter how near to God it may be, can be finally Like the released emancipated and escape the wheel of reincarnation. n Platos allegory, he will again return to the philosopher-prisoner cave, so long as his fellows are still there in darkness and in chains. Gibrans Prophet, as he prepares to board his ship, says Should my voice fade in your ears, and my love vanish in your memory, then I will come again. A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body. A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me. 3 In literary terms, this moment of rest upon the wind for Almustafa was brief indeed.Only five years elapsed on his departure from 1 Ibid. , p. 47. 2 Ibid. , pp. 46-47. 3 Ibid. , 105. p. 67 Orphalese before he was given birth again not by another woman, as he had foretold, but by Gibran himself. His name this time was not Almustafa but Jesus. Jesus the Son of Man, Gibrans second book after The Prophet, appeared in 1928, the first being only a short collection of ap horisms under the title of Sand and Foam. To the student of Gibrans literary art, Jesus the Son of Man may offer some novelty, but not so to the student of his thought.Gibran in this book tries to portray Christ as he understands him by inviting to speak of him each from his a number of Christs contemporaries own point of view. Their views combined in the mind of the reader are intended to bring out the desired portrait. But names, places and situations apart, the Jesus so portrayed in the the book is not so much of the Biblical Christ, as he is the old Biblical a new development Gibranian Almustafa. transformed into another Like Nazarene who Almustafa he is expound as The chosen and the beloved, after several previous rebirths is come and will come again to help lead men to their larger selves.He is not a God who has taken human form, but an ordinary man of ordinary birth who has been able through spiritual sublimation to elevate himself from the human to the divine. His several r eturns to earth are the several returns of the eagle who would not taste the full freedom of infinite before all his fledgedesire, says lings are taught to fly. Were it not for a mothers Gibrans Jesus, I would have denudateped me of the swaddling-clothes and escaped back to space. And were it not for sorrow in all of you, . I would not have stayed to weep. I Therefore Gibrans Jesus was neither meek nor humble nor characterized by pity. His return to earth is the return of a winged spirit, intent on appealing not to human frailties, but to the role in man which is capable of lifting him from the finite to the infinite. One reporter on Jesus says, I am sickened and the bowels within call Jesus humble and me stir and rise when I hear the faint-hearted and when the that they may discharge their own faint-heartedness meek, for comfort and companionship, down-trodden, speak of Jesus as a worm shining by their side.Yes, my heart is sickened by such men. It is the mighty hunter I would preach, and the mountainous spirit 2 unconquerable. Gibrans Jesus is even made to re-utter the Lords prayer in a way 1 Jesus The Sonof Man, p. 19. 2 Ibid. , p. 4. 68 to the heart and lips of Almustafa, appropriate teaching man to himself to the point of becoming one with the all-inclusive enlarge Our father in earth and heaven, sacred is Thy name. Thy will be done with us, even as in space ..In Thy compassion liberate us and enlarge us to forgive one another. Guide us towards Thee and stretch down Thy hand to us in darkness. For Thine is the kingdom, and in Thee is our power and our fulfilment To dwell further on the character and teachings of Jesus as conIn The Prophet, Gibran the ceived by Gibran is to risk redundancy. creative thinker reaches his climax. His post-Prophet works, with the possible exception of The Earth Gods of 1931, the last book published in his lifetime, have almost nothing new to offer. s a collection of The Wanderer of 1932, published posthumously, and sayi ngs much in the style and spirit of The Forerunner of parables 1920, published three years before The Prophet. As to The Garden of the in 1933, it should be dismissed Prophet, also published posthumously as a fake and a forgery. Gibran, who had planned The Garden immediately state of being and of the Prophet to be an expression of Almustafas after he had arrived in the isle of his birth from the city of teachings Orphalese, had only time left to write two or three short passages for that book.Other passages were added, some of which are translations from Gibrans early Arabic works, and some possibly written by another pen in imitation of Gibrans style. The result was a book to Gibran, in which Gibrans attributed are poetry and thought to a most unhappy state of chaos and confusion. brought This leaves us with The Earth Gods as the complete work with which Gibrans career comes to its conclusion. And a fitting conclusion it is indeed. The book is a long prose poem where, in the words of Gibran, The three earth-born Gods, the Master Titans of Life hold a discourse on the destiny of man. is career was a poet of alienation and Gibran, who throughout strikes us in The Prophet and in Jeszrs the Son of Man, Almuslonging, tafas duplicate, as having arrived at his long-cherished state of intellectual rest and spiritual fulfilment. Almustafa and Christ, who in Gibrans reckoning are earth-born Gods, reveal human destiny as being mans gradual ascent through love and spiritual sublimation 1 Ibid. , p. 60. 69 towards ultimate reunion with God, the absolute and the infinite. It is possible that Gibran began to have second thoughts about the philosophy of his prophet towards the end of his life.Otherwise why is it that instead of one earth God, one human destiny, he now presents us with three who apparently are in disagreement ? Shortly after Jesus the Son of Man, (libran, who had for some time been fighting a chronic illness, came to realize that the fates were not on his si de. Like Almustafa, he must have seen his ship coming in the mist to take him to the isle of his birth and in the sole(a)(a) journey of towards death, armed as he was with the mystic convictions Almustafa, he must have often stopped to examine the implications of his philosophy.In his farewell address to the people of Orphalese, Almustafa saw his departure as A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind. But what of this never-failing cycle of births and rebirths? If mans ultimate destiny as a finite being is to unite with the infinite, then that destiny is a virtual impossibility. For the road to the infinite is infinite, and mans quest as a traveller through reincarnation is bound to be endless and fruitless. Therefore comes the voice of Gibrans first God Weary is my spirit of all there is.I would not move a hand to create a world Nor to erase one. I would not live could I but die, For the weight of aeons is upon me, And the ceaseless moan of the seas exhaust my sleep. Could I but lose the primal aim And vanish like a wasted sun Could I but strip my divinity of its purpose And breathe my immortality into space And be no more Could I but be consumed and pass from times memory Into the emptiness of nowhere. In another place this same God says For all that I am, and all that there is on earth, And all that shall be, inviteth not my soul.Silent is thy face, And in thine eyes the shadows of night are sleeping. But terrible is thy silence, And thou art terrible. 2 1 The Earth Gods, 3. p. 2 Ibid. , pp. 5-6. 70 If man in his ascent to the infinite is likened to a mountain- crampon, then these moments of gloom and impuissance only occur when he casts his eyes towards the infinitely removed summit beyond. It is not so when he casts his eyes downwards and sees the heights he has already scaled. The loneliness and gloom then give way to optimism and reassurance.For a journey that can be started is a journey that can be concluded. Gibran on his lonely voyage must have turned to see There we hear the this other implication in Almustafas philosophy. voice of the second God, whose eyes are turned optimistically downwards. His philosophy is that the height of the summit is a part of the lowliness of the valley beneath. That the valley is now transcended is a reassurance that the summit can be considered as already conquered. For to reach the summit is to reach the highest point to which a valley could raise its depth.Mans journey to God is therefore a journey inwards and not an external quest. The second God says to the first We are the beyond and we are the most high And between us and the boundless timelessness Is naught save our unshaped passion And the motive thereof. You invoke the unknown, And the unknown clad with moving mist Dwells in your own soul. Yea, in your own soul your redeemer lies asleep And in sleep sees what your wake eye does not see. Forbear and look down upon the world. Behold the unweaned children of your love.The earth is your abode, and the earth is your faeces And high beyond mans furtherest hope Your hand upholds his destiny. Yet in Gibrans lonely journey towards death, a voice not so pessimistic as that of his first God nor so optimistic as that of the second from the youthful past of is heard. This voice, coming perhaps Broken Wings and A Tear and a Smile, though not part of Almustafas voice, is yet not out of harmony with it. It is the voice of someone who has come to realize that man has so busied himself philosophizing to live it.Rather than the climber about life that he has forgotten terrified by the towering height of the summit or reassured by the lowliness of the valley, here is a love-intoxicated youth in the spring meadows 1 Ibid. , on the mountainside. p. 22. 71 There is a wedding in the valley. Brothers, my brothers, the third God rebukes his two fellows, A day too vast for recording. We shall pass into the twilight Perchance to wake to the dawn of another world. But love shal l stay, And his finger-marks shall not be erased. The blessed forge burns, The sparks rise, and each spark is a sun.Better it is for us, and wiser, To seek a shadowed nook and sleep in our earth divinity And let love, human and frail, command the coming day. Thus Gibran concludes his life-long alienation. His thought in the twilight of his days seems to have swung back to his youth where it first started. It is a complete cycle, in conformity, though perhaps unconsciously, The tenacious cedar tree which was with his idea of reincarnation. Gibran the Prophet went back again to the seed that it was to love, to wake to the dawn of another world. 2 human and frail-Perchance N. NAIMY 1 Ibid. , pp. 25-26. 2 Ibid. , pp. 38-41.