Tears and Laughter
TEARS AND LAUGHTER
Philosophical eLibrary Editions
of works by Kahlil Gibran
Between Night and Morn
Mirrors of the Soul
The Procession
Secrets of the Heart
Spirits Rebellious
The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran
A Second Treasury of Kahlil Gibran
A Third Treasury of Kahlil Gibran
Wings of Thought
A Philosophical eLibrary Edition
TEARS AND LAUGHTER
KAHLIL GIBRAN
With a New Preface by
Susan Braudy
PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY
New York
To M.E.H.
I present this book—first breeze in the tempest
of my life—to that noble spirit who walks
with the tempest and loves with the breeze.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
TIMELINE
GIBRAN QUOTES
EDITOR’S PREFACE
FOREWORD
THE CREATION
HAVE MERCY ON ME, MY SOUL!
TWO INFANTS
THE LIFE OF LOVE
THE HOUSE OF FORTUNE
SONG OF THE WAVE
A POET’S DEATH IS HIS LIFE
PEACE
THE CRIMINAL
THE PLAYGROUND OF LIFE
SONG OF FORTUNE
THE CITY OF THE DEAD
SONG OF THE RAIN
THE WIDOW AND HER SON
THE POET
SONG OF THE SOUL
LAUGHTER AND TEARS
SONG OF THE FLOWER
VISION
THE VICTORS
SONG OF LOVE
TWO WISHES
SONG OF MAN
YESTERDAY AND TODAY
BEFORE THE THRONE OF BEAUTY
LEAVE ME, MY BLAMER
A LOVER’S CALL
THE BEAUTY OF DEATH
THE PALACE AND THE HUT
A POET’S VOICE
THE BRIDE’S BED
Kahlil Gibran
Photograph by Fred Holland Day, circa 1898
The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress,
Prints & Photographs Division
Kahlil Gibran
April 1913
The Gibran Museum,
formerly the Monastery of Mar Sarkis,
Besharri, Lebanon
Photograph © Eliane29 / www.fotosearch.com
Introduction
Kahlil Gibran is a wonderful figure—a genius—a man of contradictions. For starters, he’s an internationally revered Arabic mystic who lived most of his forty-seven years in Boston and Manhattan. (He was born in 1883 in Bisharri, a poor Christian village nestled among the historic and holy cedar covered hills of northern Lebanon—cited in the Bible as the Cedars of Lebanon.) A spiritual man raised as a Catholic, Gibran nonetheless believed all religions holy. Despite abandonment by his father, Gibran regularly sent the man money and heartening letters. Another contradiction: he’s cited as the best-selling poet of the 20th century, but Gibran toiled most of his life as a painter. Furthermore, even when writing prose, he uses the language of a poet. The most vexing contradiction is that despite lukewarm critical reception, Gibran’s soulful writings have stirred the hearts and passions of millions of people throughout the world. Indeed people recite his words when making marriage vows and to mark other highly emotional rites of passage. His words were spoken by young President John Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural speech.
One final contradiction in Gibran’s life lurks in this magical volume Tears And Laughter. In his prose poem “A Poet’s Death Is His Life,” he writes of his distaste for a city “of [the] living rich.” Indeed this Manhattan resident ardently rhapsodizes about the beauty of nature as compared to the oppressive and ugly greed of city dwellers. In this volume, he also writes the parable “Before The Throne Of Beauty” about the beauty of the rolling hills and woods of Lebanon. In this parable the narrator encounters a Nymph of the Jungle who soothes his mind about his life in the rapacious city. He repeats her words to himself: “Beauty is that which attracts your soul,/ And that which loves to give and not receive.”
The Prophet (his uplifting work that is celebrated as the best-selling book of poetry of the 20th century) is prose poetry and consists of twenty-six inspirational chapters teaching that the reader is far far greater than he or she knows, and all is well.
Tears And Laughter is a similarly vital book of his writings. Most of its twenty-six poems and parables written in poetic language appeared in an Arabic newspaper when Gibran was very young—a precociously wise, displaced teenager living in poverty with his siblings and his beloved mother Kamila. They had immigrated to a Syrian-Lebanese community in Boston’s south end. The young man writes about spirituality and morality attempting to penetrate the pure natures of tragedy, joy and even death. The rich, exotic pieces that constitute Tears And Laughter also extol artistic expression.
Indeed he values artists far above other people—particularly the rich, greedy and powerful, an important theme in this tender volume Tears And Laughter.
In the parable Laughter And Tears, Gibran writes: “Money! The source of insincere love; the spring of false light and fortune; the well of poisoned water; the desperation of old age!”
In his prose poem “The Poet,” he calls the poet “a link between this and the coming world who people ignore in this life, but who is recognized only after he bids the earthly/ World farewell and returns to his arbor in heaven.” He concludes that the poet will one day rule everyone’s hearts, and thus his kingdom has no ending.
This young man could have been speaking nearly a hundred years ago of his own immortal legacy.
Amazingly enough some thirty years after his death Kahlil Gibran was rediscovered and worshipped in the 1960s and 1970s by people of all ages and persuasions, including millions of young counter-culture romantics such as David Bowie and John Lennon—who quoted Gibran in his song “Julia.”
For President John Kennedy’s inaugural speech in 1961, speechwriter Theodore Sorenson adroitly deleted the earnest poesy about nature from Gibran’s original lines:
Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or are you a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert.
Gibran’s idealistic and passionate words appeared in his 1925 essay first published in Arabic when the artist was forty-two.
Sorenson also borrowed the title of the same Gibran essay “The New Frontier” as the name of President Kennedy’s administration to inspire Americans to support and love President Kennedy. The phrase would be a rallying cry for the young president’s utopian ambitions and programs to banish the ills of poverty and to travel into outer space.
Kennedy’s words about the New Frontier touched millions. Although uncredited, Gibran would have had reason to be proud. The new president—the idealistic son of the sort of rich greedy man Gibran railed against in Tears And Laughter—promised his fellow Americans:
[W]e stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats. … Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.
Kahlil Gibran knew tragedy at an early age. In this transcendent collection Tears And Laughter, he writes about it with the wisdom and passion of a far older person. Thus, when he was eight his idyllic world was destroyed. He’d been living with his parents and siblings in the lush green cedar-covered mountains of northern Lebanon. A local priest, impressed by the poverty-stricken little boy’s mind and sensibility, was teaching him the Bible and language. He was too poor to attend a school.
Gibran’s first tragedy was caused by his rough, dissolute father. After the father lost his job at a pharmacy, he became a criminal enforcer for a local emir in an attempt to support his family and pay his gambling debts. When he was jailed for embezzling, the family became homeless. Gibran’s mother Kamila Gibran, however, was a woman of strong character who came from a prestigious religious family. She saved the day. She gathered her children and left for the United States.
1 comment