Alan Jacobs on the collected works of Kahlil Gibran. Subscription only, unfortunately, but if you subscribe, definitely RTWT. Hilarious. A taste is here, but this is my favorite passage:
Gibran's Jesus,
An oriental sage, a speaker of wry Wisdom,
A lover of paradox, a Judge only of others--
Oh yes, He can be wrathful,
But never to me the reader of Gibran,
Only to those whom I already dislike,
The powerful, the greedy, the cruel:
Those with whom I shall never be confused.
(The family Gibran was Marionite Catholic,
And in this faith Kahlil was raised,
And though he loathed the Church
He claimed always to love Jesus.
But the truth of this claim I cannot tell.)
To me--and perhaps to you, dear sisters and brothers--
The Jesus give by Kahlil Gibran, and likewise his prophet,
Who is himself somewhat Jesusish, bring words of comfort:
What befalls us is part of the plan.
But no --I repent me of some lowercase letters--
I mean to say, Part of the Plan.
or possibly this:
"Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth,'"
One of infinitely many truths, it seems,
"For the soul walks upon all paths,"
Which means that anything the Prophet says
Falls like a perfectly formed olive leaf
Upon at least one of those paths,
So that his profundity is everlasting and without diminishment,
As lonf as he pronounces oratorically
After the manner of Sir Laurence Olivier
Reading the King James Bible.
And it is the voice of Sir Laurence
Reading the King James Bible
That I hear within me as I write these words,
Which echo resonates within me and bequeaths to me
The Prophetic Strain,
At least as far as you know.
Once that voice enters the mind,
As it does when one has read hundreds and hundreds of pages of Kahlil Gibran,
Its abode is fixed within,
It refuses all notices of eviction,
It continues to loop within the sphere of one's skull,
An earworm, dread and implacable.
Subscribe to:
Comment Feed (RSS)
