It was a usual day in the library. For the first time in life, I finally knew what I yearned for knowledge & a place where there’s plenty of it: Panjab university’s library.
A.C. Joshi Library, located in the Panjab University, is not for casual students. It is a “respite for soul” place for the curious ones. The ones who want to know it all. The ones with an insatiable hunger for more!
Though I was a post-graduate student at that time, the name “Khalil Gibran” (or Kahlil Gibran) didn’t ring any bells. But the word “Lebanese” poet aroused some curiosity, and that’s how I opened the first page.
And then I couldn’t put it down for a moment – read it while eating, in the class, in the hostel common room, almost everywhere. There it was, one of the most enchantingly romantic works one could read, “The Broken Wings: Khalil Gibran“.
A take on spiritual love, with its purity intact, The Broken Wings is like an intense lyric, the depths of which are unfathomable to a mortal being. Here’s an excerpt from the text:
“Every young man remembers his first love and tries to recapture that strange hour, the memory of which changes his deepest feeling and makes him so happy despite all the bitterness of its mystery.
Today, after many years have passed, I’ve nothing left out of that beautiful dream except painful memories flapping like invisible wings around me, filling the depths of my heart with sorrow, and bringing tears to my eyes; and my beloved, beautiful Selma, is dead and nothing is left to commemorate her except my broken heart and tomb surrounded by cypress trees.
That tomb and this heart are all that is left to bear witness of Selma.
The silence that guards the tomb does not reveal God’s secret in the obscurity of the coffin, and the rustling of the branches whose roots suck the body’s elements do not tell the mysteries of the grave, by the agonized sighs of my heart announce to the living the drama which love, beauty, and death have performed. “
The tragedy of love is beautifully captured in the masterpiece.
But love’s not the only facet of Gibran’s work.
Another classic, “The Prophet”, discusses practical answers to spiritual & philosophical aspects of daily life. Matters of marriage, death, talking, children, and giving are touched upon with soft-soothing words, showing his creative genius in the poetic form.
Here’s an excerpt from “On Talking” by Khalil Gibran:
On Talking:
“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, And sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly… There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone. The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape… “
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