![]() Kahlil Gibran, Pain (1923), Illustration for The Prophet, Watercolour. The enduring convention of signing works with a singular name has tended to result in the eclipsing of efforts of crucial contributors, often women. He ended his life primarily close to his sole-remaining sibling, Marianna and his secretary, and later biographer, Barbara Young.ĭue to the extensive number of edits that Haskell offered on most of Gibran’s works across his career (including his first publication, a short poem), it is almost certain that “his” output - like many artistic achievements - might be more accurately deemed a collaboration. In Gibran’s case, since evidence suggests that he evaded a sexual relation with Haskell, he at least did not leave her with the financial burden of children (not uncommon in his time). He was “discovered” by Fred Holland Day, a teacher, who dabbled in the worlds of Blavatsky and the occultism that was de jour, and who liked to photograph young men, both in exotic garments and out. Having grown up, from the age of 12, in the ghettos of Boston’s South End, he survived by hoisting himself, or finding himself flung, into more privileged circles thanks to his looks, his talent (he could paint and write) and his “mysterious” appeal of being the “other”.Īnglo-Americans could, in other words, accessorise with him. He was a beautiful, “oriental” young man. Kahlil Gibran, Nude Figures Lying at the Foot of a Mountain by a Lake, (1923-1931), Watercolour. Gibran had a tendency to get involved, as Joan Acocella writes in her detailed New Yorker piece, with older women who could be useful to him. She continued to edit his work discreetly well into her own marriage, to which she had resigned herself after their engagement stalled. Haskell had a penchant for enabling the less fortunate (although she herself was not wealthy), and Gibran was not her first project of this kind. The latter remained devoted to him her entire life and also financed much of his lifestyle, enabling his artistic projects up until and beyond his success with The Prophet. The woman behind the poetīiographers have emphasised Gibran’s tendency to pretension, to self-aggrandising, to fictionalising his own history, and his relations with women such as his sister, Marianna (who supported him with menial work), and especially his patron and confidante, Mary Haskell. You may house their bodies but not their souls,įor their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.Įven as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart must stand in the sun, so we must know your pain. You may give them your love but not your thoughts … stand together yet not too near together:įor the pillars of the temple stand apart,Īnd the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. Gibran himself had been in the US for 12 years at the time of writing and, it could be argued, was in a kind of exile from Lebanon, the country of his own birth.Īmong many subjects, The Prophet offers contemplations on marriage: Now therefore disclose us to ourselves, and tell us all that has been shown you of that which is between birth and death. In your aloneness you have watched with our days, and in your wakefulness you have listened to the weeping and laughter of our sleep. Filled with grief at his imminent departure, the townspeople gather and beseech him to give them words of wisdom to ease their sorrow: The book, which presents advice on a number of core aspects of being human - such as love, parenting, friendship, Good and Evil, and so on - employs a simple narrative device.Īn exiled man, Almustafa, who has been living abroad for 12 years, sees the ship that will carry him back “to the isle of his birth” approaching. The Prophet appears to embrace all or any spiritual tradition (or at least to exclude none explicitly), and this vagueness or openness (depending on one’s reading) may account for part of its widespread appeal. Gibran has been referred to as the midwife of the New Age, due to the role The Prophet played in opening a space for spiritual or personal counsel outside organised religion and its official texts. Image of the The Prophet by Kahill Gibran.
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