Also, during the period of 1898 he edited the literary and philosophical magazine Al Hakikat (The Truth). Finally, in 1900, motivated by admiration for the great Arabian thinkers he had studied in classes, he undertook to make drawings of these personages though no portraits of them existed. He made sketches of the early Islamic poets Al Farid, Abu N’Was, and Al Mutanabbi; of the philosophers Ibn Sina and Ibn Khaldun; and of Khansa, the great Arabic woman poet.10 But most particularly Gibran had one love experience which marked his life deeply. It was his first romance with Miss Hala Daher whom he immortalized in his novel The Broken Wings (1912) under the name of Selma. He wished to marry her but was refused because she issued from a wealthy family, and was promised already as a child by her parents to the hands of someone else. This first contact with the aristocratic Lebanese family made him resent all his fife the oriental tradition of marriages that were prearranged on the grounds of social classes.

At eighteen, Gibran graduated from Al-Hikmat with high honors. But, still eager to acquire knowledge, he decided this time to go to Paris to learn painting. On his way from Beirut to Paris, in 1901, he visited Greece, Italy, and Spain. Gibran stayed two years in Paris, during which he wrote Spirits Rebellious, his famous criticism of Lebanese high official society, religious ministers, and corrupted marriage love. For this book, Gibran was excommunicated from the Maronite Church and exiled by Lebanon’s Turkish Government; also both of them burned his work in the market place in Beirut.

In 1903, Gibran received a grim letter from Peter requesting him that he get back to Boston because his sister Sultana had just died from tuberculosis and his mother Kamila was seriously sick in bed. Shortly after his arrival Gibran had to take his mother, who was suffering from tuberculosis, to a hospital where she laid bedridden for many long months. The miseries of Gibran increased when in March of the same year Peter, the beloved half-brother who paid for his entire education, succumbed under the yoke of the same plague; three months later his mother remitted her soul into the hands of the Good Lord. The loss of Kamila was depressing on his morale for he loved her immensely. In my opinion she was his first female poetic “muse.” The lines that he dedicated to motherhood in The Broken Wings were inspired by his mother love.

The most beautiful word on the lips of mankind is the word “Mother,” and the most beautiful call is the call of “My mother.” It is a word full of hope and love, a sweet and kind word coming from the depths of the heart. The mother is everything—she is our consolation in sorrow, our hope in misery, and our strength in weakness. She is the source of love, mercy, sympathy, and forgiveness. He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly.

Everything in nature bespeaks the mother. The sun is mother of earth and gives it its nourishment of heat, it never leaves the universe at night until it has put the earth to sleep to the song of the sea and the hymn of birds and brooks. And this earth is the mother of trees and flowers. It produces them, nurses them, and weans them. The trees and flowers become kind mothers of their great fruits and seeds. And the mother, the prototype of all existence, is the eternal spirit, full of beauty and love.11

Death’s wretchedness left him alone with Mariana, his other sister. It goes without saying that the misfortunes of 1903 engraved deep traces of sadness on the poet’s soul. Historically, I believe that if Gibran has become a philosopher of human sorrows, and a great psychologist of the finitude of human nature, it is because he immensely experienced the existential anxiety of suffering, and the facticities of human predicaments.

During the following years Gibran painted, designed book covers and wrote in Arabic many short essays as well as he revised for the second time The Prophet written in Arabic. By early 1904, he held an exhibition of his paintings in the studio of Fred Holland Day, a friend photographer. When the studio was opened, only a few visitors showed up. To his embarrassment no one asked the price; the audience rather criticized and laughed at his work. However, among the spectators, came one woman named Miss Mary Haskell, a principal of school, to whom Gibran’s work appealed so much to her sense of beauty and mysticism that she offered him the opportunity to display his paintings in her institution: Cambridge School for Girls. From such a miraculous encounter, an everlasting tie of friendship formed between Gibran and Miss Haskell. She became his first patron and benefactress.12 Thus, it was she who advised him to go for a second time to Paris in 1908, and financed his studies at the Academie Julien and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. In a letter he wrote to a friend he personified Miss Haskell as heaven and a she-angel: “who is ushering me towards a splendid future and paving me the path of intellectual and financial success.”13

It is worthwhile to pause for a moment at this point and ponder on the relationships Gibran nurtured with two women of this epoch. For one he had a Platonic love while for the other it was a Freudian love.