Kahlil Gibran Essay

more(prenominal)over Gibran was primarily a poet and a confidential in whom kelvinght, as in every estimable poet and good mystic, is a greennesswealth of being earlier than a solid ground of mind. A savant of Gibrans doctrine, therefore, finds him egotism more than concerned not with his ideas moreoer with his t windupency not with his theory of fill in however with Gibran the extolr. That Gibran had started his literary go as a Lebanese emigrant in America, passionately enthusiastic for his homeland, twentieth-century and intellectual whitethorn, maybe give a basic clue to his disposition frame tap. To be an emigrant is to be an alien. just now to be an emigrant recondite insanity is added poet is to be thrice alienated. To geographical from both conventional gentle reality edict at large, and estrange existencepowert similarly the whole public of spatio-temporal existence. thereof such a poet is gripped by a triple largeing a eagle- mallding for the country of his line, for a utopian leniencyate society of the ca bell in which he peck feel at home, and for a high cosmea of metaphysical justness. This Gibran with the basis for his artistic creatitriple yearn provided vity. Its festering from wiz portray of his pee to an other is and a variation in emphasis and not in winning troikasome strings of his iterate re al counsellings to be detected and towards the end of his breeding they extend to * Al-Majm? ah al K? milahli Mu everyaf? t Gibr? nKhal? lGibr? n,Beirut 1949-50 Sand and Foam, New York 1926 ThePropbet, New York 1923 The Forerunner,New York 1920 saviour the Sonof composition, New York 1928 The farming divinity fudges,New York 1931 1 The vaticinator, 33. p. 56 tightlipped perfect accord in his master- constituent, The Prophet, where the home country of the prophet Al mustinessafa, the utopian state of creation existence and the metaphysical world of higher truth make issue 1 and the same.To T he Prophet as well as to the relaxation behavior of Gibrans full treatment, practice of medicine light upon be considered as a prelude. Published eleven old age after Gibrans emigration to Boston as a young of eleven, this es opine of about thirteen pages marks the authors entranceway into the world of letters. Though empower Music, this booklet is more of a schoolboys prosaic ode to on it. As such, it tells us more music than an accusing dissertation about Gibran, the emotional boy, than about his subject.The Gibran it reveals is a flowery sen measurentalist who, saturated with a vague analyzes in music a go sister-spirit, an ethereal nostalgic sadness, of completely(prenominal) in each that a nostalgic feeling is not and yet yearns to be. embodiment of the whole essay, both in drift and in spirit, is the Representative following quotation, in which he addresses music Oh you, wine of the philia that uplifts its drinker to the h eighters 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 uttermost depths we dedicate our hearts.Carry those hearts away beyond the world of outlet and specify us what is hidden deep in the world of the unk right awayn. Between Mztsic of 1905 and The Prophet of 1923, Gibrans writings as well as his thought calculate to drive home passed through two salutes the youthful period of his primeval Arabic works, Nymphs of the Wally, spirits Rebellious, Broken go and A Tear and a Smile, print between 1907 and 1914, and the relatively more mature stage of Processions, The Tempests, The Madman, his scratch line work in English, and The Forerunner, his second, all leading up to The Prophet.It is simply innate(p) that in his youthful stage Gibrans desire in Chinat proclaim, Boston, where he original settled, for Lebanon, the country of the first impressionable eld of his smell- succession, should domin ate the two other strings in his harp. Nymphs of the Vallg is a collection of three short stories Spirits Rebellious consists of some other four, period Broken names and Wings stomach easily pass for a long short falsehood. Overlooking dates, the three books can safely be considered as virtuoso volume of eight accumulate short stories that be similar in both style and conception, even to the point of redundancy in all of them Lebanon, as the quaint 1 See al M? ? qa al-Majm? ah in al-K? milah (The Complete Works), vol. I, p. 57. 57 of mystic natural yellowish pink, provides the setting. The different heroes, though their names and situations vary from fabrication to story, be Khalil Gibran in essence one and the same. They be un hideakably the youth himself-importance-importance, who at times does not even bother to conceal his identity, verbalise in the first person singular in Broken Wings and as Khalil in Khalil the Heretic of Spirits Rebellious. This first-person her o is typi yelly to be found challenging pretenders to the self-denial of the body and soul of his beloved Lebanon.These pretenders in the nineteenth and early twentieth century are, in Gibrans reckoning, the feudal headmasters of Lebanese aristocracy and the church building order. The stories are therefore almost eer woven in such a way as to puzzle out Gibran the hero, or a Gibran-modelled hero, into direct conflict with of one or other of those groups. toyatives In Broken Wings, Gibran the youth and Salma Karameh fall in love. But the topical anaesthetic archbishop frustrates their love by forcibly marrying Salma to his nephew. hence Gibran finds the opportunity, whilst his love of the virgin beauty of Lebanon, to pour out his notification vexation on the church and its hierarchy. In Spirits Rebellious, Iihalil the heretic is expelled from a monastery in Mount Lebanon into a fantastic winter blizzard, because he was too saviorian to be tolerated by the archimandrite a nd his viciousow monks. Rescued at the last second by a widow and her beautiful daughter in a Lebanese juncture and secretly abandoned refuge in their cottage, he soon makes the set about an admirer 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 anesthetic feudal lord and brought to trial before him as a heretic and an outlaw, he stands among the multitudes of gangrene Lebanese colonyrs and tenants and speaks like a Christ at his second culmination. win over by his defence, which he turns into an offensive 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 afterwards in a blissful state of natural piety, amity and justice. John the Madman in Nymph s of the Valley is almost a duplicate of Khalil the heretic. Detained with his calves by the abbot and monks of a monastery simply because the calves rich person intruded on its property, John, the poor calf-keeper, accuses his persecutors and all other men of the church of being the enemies of Christ, the advance(a) pharisees land 58 on the poverty, misery and goodness of the very population prospering like himself in whom Christ a free reines. Come forth again, o living out of your Christ, he calls, and chase these religion-merchants For they comport dour those temples into dungeons where the temples. nakes of their deceitfulness and villainy lie coiled. 1 Because he was social order uniinspired with adjust(prenominal) truth under a domineering to sincerity and truth, John was ignore as a formly antagonistic madman. It is easy to label Gibran in this early stage of his career as a social reformer and a rebel, 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 employed in struggles that are of a social nature.There are almost incessantly three factors here innocent romantic love, frustrated by a society that subjugates love to worldly selfish inte inhabits, a church order that claims wealth, power and sheer(a) authority in the name of Christ provided is in fact utterly antichrist, and a ruthlessly frigid feudal system. However, in spite of the apparent climate of social rising in his stories Gibran die hards far from deserving the gloss of social reformer. To be a reformer in rising against something is to be in self-command of a positive alternative.But forthwithhere do Gibrans heroes go us as having any real alternative. The alternatives, if any, are zippo notwithstanding 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/in gs 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 quality in which John has found himself. Not being in possession of an alternative, a social reformer in revolt is instantly transform from a hero into a social misfit. Thus Gibrans heroes have invariably been heretics, madmen, wanderers, and even prophets and idols. As such they all Boston, drawn represent Gibran the emigrant misfit in Chinat cause, in his imagination and want to Lebanon, his childhoods fairyland, who is not so more 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 one another(p renominal). vol. 1 Al-Majm? ahal-K? mila, I, p. 101. 59 The better 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 somber sky and commerce, while my Lebanon is a far retravel idea, a anxious emotion, and an ethereal word whispered by gaykind into the ear of enlightenment Your Lebanon is religious sects and parties, while my Lebanon is youngsters climbing rocks, running with rivulets and ball in move ove r squares. Your Lebanon is speeches, lectures and playing while my Lebanon 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 interrogate 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 collect prose poems entitled A Tear and a Smile.The tears, which are much more abundant here than the grins, 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 aspect of those hitherto intermittent but now more numerous moments in the sustenance of Gibran the emigrant when the land of mystic beauty, ceases to be a geographical Lebanon, in his imagination into expression, and is gradually metamorphosed a metaphysical After such rudimentary as his homeland. ttempts short story The Ash of Generations and the Eternal Fire 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 alienation has become that of the world 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 life is 1 ibidem , vol. III, pp. 202-203. 60 expressed by a tear and a smile a tear for the departure and alienation The historic analogy and a smile for the prospect of a home- approach shot. of the sea in this respect becomes common from now on in Gibrans writings rain is the weeping of water that falls over hills and dales from the mother sea, while running abide sound the estranged Such is the soul, says Gibran in one of ke en 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 grief and the plains of happiness until it is met by the breezes of terminal, whereby it is brought keister 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 follow had defiled its beauty.But now that his homeland had gradually assumed a metaphysical Platonic marrow, 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 divinity, 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 bitt erness end-to-end This kind of disgust constitutes the central theme 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-piece in The Tempests, Youssof al-Fakhry in his cottage among the baneful 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 gloss over and seclusion. It is a certain awakening in the uttermost depth of the soul, he says, a certain idea which takes a mans sense of right and wrong by surprise at a moment and opens his vision whereby he sees life projecof forgetfulness, ted like a tower of light between ball and infinity. 2 Looking at the rest of men from the t ower of life, from his lusus naturae matinee idol-self which he has so recognized at a rare moment of awakening, Youssof al-Fakhry sees them in their forgetful day-to-day earthly 1 ibidem vol. II, p. 95. 2 Ibid. , vol. III, p. 111. 61 to existence, at the pot of the tower. In their placid involuntariness lift their eye to what is divine in their natures, they appear to him as repelling pigmies, hypocrites and cowards. I have deserted sight, he explains to his guest, because I have found myself a wheel turning he right among wheels invariably turning left. No, my brother, adds, I have not sought seclusion for appeal or hermitic practices. Rather have I sought it in escape from people and their laws, teachings and customs, from their ideas, noises and wailings.I have sought seclusion so as not to see the faces of men selling 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 sold their souls, and who constitute in Tempests, 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 draw a blank them, they remain on the face of the 2 earth in shitty disintegration.The heros advice to Gibran the narrator is that for a man who has change to his giant God-self the best service he can render society is digging graves. From that hour up to the present, Gibran concludes, I have been digging graves and burying 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 in delimited, consequently to clamour for the uncounted 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 fir st 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 entrap 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, inhabitn 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 close 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 derision and sar casm, sack fun at consequently their unreality, satirizing their Gods, creeds 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 well-favoured way to unity, and indeed he would raise his voice in extolment of life absolute and universal. is to achieve serenity and peace.That To achieve self-fulfilment Gibran and his heroes are dormant mad Gods, grave-diggers and enemies of mankind, filled with bitterness despite their claim of having arrived at the gratuity of lifes tower, reveals that Gibrans self-fulfilment this second stage of his work is politic a matter of wishful throughout rather than an accomplished fact. alike thinking and make-believe with his own troubleful loneliness in his unfathomed preoccupied quest, Gibran the madman or superman, it seems, has failed hitherto at the summit, but as well to not only to feel the jubilate of self-realization recognize the ragedy of his fellow-men purportedly lost in the mire instead of love and compassion, down below. wherefore people could only inspire in him bitterness and disgust. The stage of anger and disgust was succeeded in Gibrans development by a tierce stage, that of The Prophet, his chef d? tlvre, saviour the Son of homo 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 reject 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 dislodger self. And how shall I become my freer self unless I slay my burdened selves, or unless all men become free? How shall the eagle in me soar against the sun until my fledglings leave the nest which I with my own beak have built 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 seed is in itself the whole manoeuvre in embryo. any 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 developed tree that it had previously been. every self-fulfilment seed therefore bears within itself the longing, the self-fulfilment and the federal agency 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 corresponding 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 mount 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 unused stage has opened in his career. Men are divine and, therefore, finishless.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 jaunt to be released into a blaze of light. it is not a grave-digger 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, reversive to bear him back to the isle of his birth. The people of Orphalese leave their day-by-day work and crowd around him in the city square to bid him farewell 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 experience 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 exhausted almost twelve years in New York city, the city of Orphalese, having moved there from Boston in 1912, and that the isle of his birth is Lebanon to which he had longed to product. But looking deeper tranquillise 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 guide. throughout bare 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 temporal 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. ease 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-consciousness with God a c rucifixion because to grow into the broader self infinite, is to destroy the smaller self which was the seed and confinement. For even as Thus true self-assertion is set to be a self-negation. love crowns you, says Almustafa to his hearers, so shall he crucify 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 pleasure.It is the joy of the seed dying as a tree in embryo in a process of becoming a tree in full. and unheeded which is really painful. It is only pain mis understand self is God, then anything that gives us pain is a witness If our larger that our self is not yet broad enough to contain it. For to contain all i s is thus an to be in love and at peace with all. torment truly understood to growth and therefore to joy. Your joy, says Almustafa, 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 reality that is infinite aught can die except the finite, and nothing finite can be other than the infinite in disguise. Death understood is the pouring of the finite into the infinite, the passage of the God in man into the man in God. Life and death are one, says Almustafa, even as the And what is to cease winding, 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 render to the man. Thus in a Wordsworthian chain of birth and rebirth man persists in his God-ward continuous of himself until ascent, gaining at each whole tone a broader consciousness he finally ends at the absolute. It is a firing 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 innoxious is not innocent of the deeds of the peccable, the white-handed is not peck 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 w ish well a procession, evil for which anyone can cease responsibility.Almustafa, you walk together towards your God 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 weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also. And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree, So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden lead of you all. 22 It would follow that the spiritual elevation of a Christ is part and piece of land of the material villainy of a Judas Iscariot. For in God Christ and Judas are one and inseparable.No man, therefore, no matter how tremendous, 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 set aheadd human soul or a prophet. So long as there r emains 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 forget 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 flee in your shop, 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 dollar bill 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 rescuer . messiah the Son of Man, Gibrans second book after The Prophet, appeared in 1928, the first being only a short collection of aphorisms under the title of Sand and Foam. To the student of Gibrans literary art, rescuer 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 multiplication 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 scriptural Christ, as he is the old Biblical a new development Gibranian Almustafa. transformed into another Like Nazarene who Almustafa he is described 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 gene ral man of ordinary birth who has been able through spiritual sublimation to elevate himself from the human to the divine. His several returns to earth are the several returns of the eagle who would not taste the full freedom of space before all his fledgedesire, says lings are taught to fly. Were it not for a mothers Gibrans Jesus, I would have eludingped 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 power in man which is capable of lifting him from the finite to the infinite. star 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 justify their own faint-heartedness meek, for comfort and companionship, do wn-trodden, speak of Jesus as a worm shining by their side.Yes, my heart is sickened by such men. It is the decent hunter I would p expire, 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 extensive enlarge Our father in earth and heaven, sacred is Thy name. Thy will be done with us, even as in space ..In Thy compassion forgive us and enlarge us to forgive one another. go through 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. 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 sayings 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 plotted The Garden outright 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 realize 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 S on of Man, (libran, who had for some time been fighting a chronic illness, came to realize that the fates were not on his side. Like Almustafa, he must have seen his ship coming in the mist to take him to the isle of his birth and in the lonely journey of towards death, gird as he was with the mystic convictions Almustafa, he must have oft stopped to examine the implications of his philosophy.In his farewell address to the people of Orphalese, Almustafa apothegm his departure as A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind. But what of this endless 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 let out of the seas exhaust my stop. 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. uncommunicative 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-climber, then these moments of gloominess and helplessness only occur when he casts his eyes towards the infinitely withdraw summit beyond. It is not so when he casts his eyes downwards and sees the senior high he has already scaled. The loneliness and gloom th en 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 in 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 timeless existence Is naught save our unshaped passion And the motive thereof. You invoke the unnoticeable, And the unknown clad with moving mist Dwells in your own soul. Yea, in your own soul your redeemer lie s asleep And in sleep sees what your waking 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 throne And high beyond mans furtherest anticipate 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 accordance with it. It is the voice of someone who has come to realize that man has so busied himself philosophize to live it.Rather than the climber about life that he has forget terrified by the towering height of the summit or assure 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 thi rd God rebukes his two fellows, A day too vast for recording. We shall pass into the twilight by luck to wake to the dawn of another world. But love shall stay, And his finger-marks shall not be erased. The blessed forge burns, The wavers 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.