But also, the book teaches how these existential relations should genuinely be experienced. I know that I would not be exaggerating if for sake of comparison, I recalled to the attention of the reader that M. Heidegger, the leader of existentialism, has a somehow similar definition of the human predicament. Heidegger, following his teacher E. Husserl, characterizes man as a Mitdasein. That is metaphysically, man is a being-with-others, and in no instance could human nature be exempted from such a facticity; as for the case of solitude, isolation once more proves rather than disproves the “fact” of “togetherness.” One may retract in his ivory tower either because he wants to reevaluate the meaning of his relations with his fellowmen, or because he has been hurt by others. But in all events we realize that the metaphysical predicament of being-with-others permeates man socially and psychologically, and not the other way around.

“Intersubjectivity” is not, however, the only kind of relation Gibran sought to express. Actually, The Prophet and two others, The Garden of the Prophet (1933) and The Earth Gods (1931) form a trilogy intended to outline the three-fold relational dimensions of the existential man. The corresponding technical philosophic expressions are Mitwelt (relation with other minds; synonymous, Mitdasein), Umwelt (relation with the world), and Gotteswelt (relation with God).

The Garden of the Prophet studies man’s relation to nature (Umwelt). The emphasis is that of “ecology” and “environmentalism,” not with a scientific outlook but poetic. Gibran was a worshipper of nature and wild life. Had he lived long enough to witness to what degree our scientific inventors have intoxicated the air and polluted the rivers, there is no doubt that he would have sharply deplored our tyrannical attitude toward helpless nature. It is said that our primitive ancestors fought physically and intellectually to preserve themselves from cosmic calamities; well, today the role of master-servant relation is reversed; it is man now who presents a threat to nature. At any rate, the cosmology that Gibran propounds in the book is very much anthropomorphic. He describes human emotions with concepts borrowed from nature.

As for The Earth Gods, it explicates God’s relation to man (Gotteswelt). Man has the desire to be close to the Divine. In Gibran’s philosophy man ascends to God “in,” “through” and “with” love only. The essay is a dialogue between three gods, two of whom consider that “man is food for the gods.”14 That is, man is meat for the glory and plans of the gods, and a toy that satisfies their whims. The third god, however, is all compassion; his speech is an attempt to change the despotic attitude of the two others; he reminds them that love is the virtue of the gods; finally, to win them on his side, in favor of the human, he reminds them that man is capable of practicing the very virtue of the gods: he gives them the case of the love of man for woman.

To revert back to The Prophet, Gibran has attained his zenith among the international scholars with “the little black book”15, as he liked to refer to it because of its black cover. The thoughts contained in the work are so powerful and attractive that it has become one of the rare manuscripts ever to be translated in more than twenty languages. Every reader sees a bit of himself in the philosophic discourses of Almustafa. To many this “strange little book,”16 still serves as a guide for their examination of conscience. The following stories are true happening; Miss Young relates:

There was a young Russian girl named Marya, who had been climbing in the Rockies with a group of friends, other young people. She had gone aside from them and sat down on a rock to rest, and beside her she saw a black book. It was The Prophet, which meant nothing to her. Idley she turned the pages, then she began to read a little, then a little more. “Then,” said Marya, telling us the story, “I rushed to my friend and shouted, ‘Come and see—what I have all my life been waiting for—I have found it—Truth!”

There was another man, a lawyer who sat through an hour of reading aloud from the same book in another bookshop in Philadelphia. He was a man full of years, with a benign countenance, and he listened with a quality of attention that could not fail to attract the reader’s notice. When the evening was over this lawyer came to speak to me as others were doing, and he said, “I am a criminal lawyer. If I had read that chapter on Crime and Punishment twenty years ago I would have been a better and a happier man, and an infinitely better counsel for the defense.”

I know a gentleman in New York City, the manager of a well-known real estate firm. He told me this: “My wife has three copies of The Prophet in our house. When we meet a new acquaintance who promises to be congenial, she lends him, or her, one of the copies. According to the person’s reaction to the book we form our opinion of his worth-whileness.”… You cannot read a page without being moved in the depths of your consciousness, if you are one of those “ at all ready for the truth.”17

Sand and Foam (1926) is a compilation of maxims and aphorisms similar to those of La Rochefaucault, William Blake, and F.