I’d like to confess a few literary sins. In high school, I read, along with usual suspects like The Dharma Bums, Naked Lunch, and A Coney Island of the Mind, certifiable nonsense like Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan and Ram Dass’s The Only Dance There Is. (I don’t mean that this is all I read, though to have read any of it is sufficiently embarrassing.) All the really zonked-out Mr. Natural stuff belonged to my parents (sorry, guys), the cringe-making detritus of college in the 1970s. I’m sure now they’d say they were only holding it for a friend.

Yes, I have read these terrible things—but I’ve never read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. I’ve browsed in copies of it, copies usually found sandwiched between Steppenwolf and the Kama Sutra on dorm-issue bookshelves; it strikes me as a kind of ecumenical “Footprints,” only longer and thus not so easily translated into needlepoint. According to Joan Acocella’s piece in The New Yorker, occasioned by the rerelease of Gibran’s works, such as they are, by the Everyman’s Library, he is the third best-selling poet of all time, after Shakespeare and Lao-tzu. Gibran was also a draftsman of sorts:

[The drawings] were products of their time, or a slightly earlier time, that of the European Symbolist painters: Puvis de Chavannes, Eugène Carrière, Gustave Moreau. Often, in the foreground, one saw a sort of pileup of faceless humanity, while in the background there hovered a Greater Power—an angel, perhaps, or just a sort of milky miasma, suggestive of mystery and the soul.

“Milky miasma” describes more than just his art, alas. If the reader thinks I’m being unkind, he should direct his attention to Theodore Dalrymple’s hilarious essay on Gibran from the December 2007 New Criterion. It focuses on The Prophet in particular, so those who want a peek at the biographical details of a fabricator, bloviator, and kept man par excellence should stick with Acocella, hilarious in her own right. She even writes, inviting the ire of millions of public-transit users: “Gibran’s closest counterpart today is the Brazilian sage Paulo Coelho, and his books have sold nearly a hundred million copies.”

What about Elizabeth Gilbert’s ubiquitous Eat, Pray, Love? Amazon.com tells me that its Statistically Improbable Phrases are “four spirit brothers, kundalini shakti, magic drawing, meditation cave, old medicine man.” Am I back with my former spirit guide, Carlos Castaneda? I’ll have to check it out, for old time’s sake. At any rate, Acocella writes:

[Gibran] had intuited the theory of relativity before Einstein; he just hadn’t written it down. Thousands of times, he said, he had been sucked up into the air as dew, and “risen into clouds, then fallen as rain. . . . I’ve been a rock too, but I’m more of an air person.”

Air of an extremely high temperature, no doubt.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 9:16 AM and is filed under The Horizon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.