TOME RAIDER

It’s time to dust off the cover of “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran. This slim volume of poetic essays is most likely to be found on your parents’ bookshelf—if they were hippies—or in a New Age second-hand bookshop redolent of old incense. Although the bookflap boasts that Gibran is the “3rd bestselling poet” in the world (after William Shakespeare and Lao Tse), his works, including his masterpiece “The Prophet,” have largely sunk into obscurity. The Lebanese-American poet was either deified or demonized for most of the 20th century. Recently a far worse fate has befallen his works: indifference.

Published in 1923, “The Prophet” enjoyed relative success among Gibran’s contemporaries and was rediscovered in the 60s as a spiritual guidebook written by an “Oriental wise man.” The truth of the matter, though, is that Gibran moved to Boston’s South End at the age of 12, having previously received no formal education in the Lebanon. Though he returned to Beirut for high school, he wrote more prodigiously in English than in Arabic, and “The Prophet” is the child of his efforts. Although his biblical style is anything but innovative and the philosophie de la vie outlined in his sparse verse may seem old-fashioned at times, there remain gems of insight in his writing that make a reading of “The Prophet” today as worthwhile as when it first hit the scene.

The book tells the story of a wanderer named Almustafa who has spent 12 years in a foreign land observing its people, and is about to set sail back to his homeland. In 27 short verse-essays, the prophet guides the people in their way of life, spanning topics from the mundane—“Eating and Drinking,” “Houses,” “Law”—to the profound—“Joy and Sorrow” and “Death.” The language is simple, making repeated use of nature as an illustrative symbol. Gibran indeed relies heavily on lyrical analogies to convey his philosophical theories. For those among us unversed in reading pure philosophy, Gibran is thus doing us a favor. On child-rearing, for instance, he writes: “Your children are not your children / they come through you but not from you / and though they are with you yet they belong not to you / you are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”

Although his Arabic background is highly emphasized by his followers, to the point of hushing up his Western upbringing—on the back of my copy, George Russel writes, “I do not think the East has spoken with so a beautiful a voice since the Gitanjali”—Gibran does not speak for “the East.” Quite the contrary, he speaks from somewhere in-between, the gray area that is perhaps hardest to define. It is his unique struggle to reconcile the values of both worlds that render his work a worthy read. Not only are his views of child-rearing surprisingly modern for the 20s, but he also incorporates such stereotypically American ideas as that of personal living-space and the capitalist work ethic alongside more traditional concepts of sin and religion. Though of Christian heritage and clearly inspired by the Bible, Gibran does not constrain his concept of spirituality to one particular doctrine, and thus Almustafa’s words stil resonate with a modern-day agnostic. “Religion,” in the sense of the word that Gibran understands it, is life itself and the way we choose to live it: “Is not religion all deeds and all reflection /...all your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.”

And yet, the final teaching of the work is sadly pessimistic. The character of the prophet speaks from Gibran’s experience of being multicultural and never quite fitting in anywhere. “We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us,” Almustafa says. Gibran had allegedly toyed with the idea of writing a sequel to “The Prophet” in which Almustafa is rejected by his disciples upon his return and then stoned to death by his own people. A bleak end—regardless of the Christian connotations—that expresses Gibran’s own misgivings about his ability to reconcile two cultures.

Although the time for reading snippets of “The Prophet” aloud amid clouds of marijuana smoke may be over, and though much literature from the overzealous 60s is best left forgotten, Gibran’s work remains relevant. Not only do his images retain poetic power at face value, but they also reveal a man striving to find a balance between two very different worlds. This is a pursuit perhaps more important today than at any other time, be that Gibran’s day or the era of the hippies.

—Staff writer Anna I. Polonyi can be reached at apolonyi@fas.harvard.edu.