Anthony Daniels: The false prophet (Kahlil Gibran's new age kitsch debunked.)

The New Criterion ^ | December 2007 | Anthony Daniels

[neverdem]

For self is a sea boundless and measureless. We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words. —Kahlil Gibran

Among my mother’s books was a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I remember still the cream color of the cover, adorned with a soft-focus drawing of a young man with a thin moustache staring, Svengali-like, into some kind of philosophical infinity. Although—or was it because?—The Prophet was so popular at the time, selling by the million worldwide, I resisted reading it. I suspected that its profundity, or rather its straining after profundity, was bogus, and I was right. It is precisely in its ersatz quality that its popularity resides.

Gibran was an artist as well as a writer, and his drawings, with some of which this Collected Works is interspersed, suffer from a defect that is closely kindred to the defect from which his writing suffers.[1] They consist mainly of naked men and women, often intertwined, as seen through a censoring mist. They are pornography without the genitalia. If ever there were an exhibition of his drawings, it might with justice be titled Nudity for Prudes...

[dighton]

One looks in vain in these many pages for an arresting or poetic metaphor. I quote at random:

Dip your oar, my beloved,
And let me touch my strings.

It is impossible to plumb the shallows of this.

[AnAmericanMother]

LOL! Just another Omar Khayyam wannabe, but without the talent.

And when like her, oh Sáki, you shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,
And in your joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made One--turn down an empty Glass!

[Semper]

That was much too long and tedious an article just to say, "I really don't like Kahlil Gibran and I'll tell you why over and over again".

I'll give him an aphorism from Semper: "You can't see in others that which is not also in yourself".

[Billthedrill]

Many thanks for the ping. The appeal of Gibran is actually fairly easy to understand for those of us who were actually in our (ahem!) spiritual growth years in the 60's and 70's.

In reading The Prophet we begin to see why so tedious and unimaginative a writer as Gibran should have appealed so strongly to the counterculturals.

The answer is extremely simple - Gibran works best if you're really stoned.

;-)

[sinanju]

I think he’s slowly turning back into Anthony Daniels.

Just as John Cougar gradually turned into John Cougar Mellencamp and finally back into his real name: John Mellencamp.

[Tax-chick]

John does nothing for me under any name.