The Prophet
About five years ago, I was given a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran as a present before going traveling, so it’s very closely tied in my mind to a specific place and time, almost to the extent that I’m not sure if I can even tell if it’s any good or not. Regardless, it worked for me at the time (even though I didn’t always agree with it), and I’ve dipped back into it a couple of times since.
In the book, and over the course of twenty-eight short chapters, a spiritual leader who is about to leave his city speaks to the people on a range of themes: Love, Marriage, Children, Giving, Eating And Drinking, Work, Joy And Sorrow, Children, Clothes, Buying And Selling, Crime And Punishment, Laws, Freedom, Reason And Passion, Pain, Self Knowledge, Teaching, Friendship, Talking, Time, Good And Evil, Prayer, Pleasure, Beauty, Religion, Death. That’s all it’s about, and it’s about all of that.
I was reminded of the book again recently when I read the similarly-structured Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and decided to re-read it. So, I’m going to read a chapter during each of the twenty-eight days of February, and while I’m at it, publish each chapter to a blog each day (the book is in the public domain). Follow along by subscribing to the RSS feed and taking a few minutes out each day to slow down and reflect.
The first chapter is already online.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 1:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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February 1st, 2006 at 2:07 pm
i was listening to the frames live album (breadcrumb trail) and when performing red cord glen hansard goes through a list of people he wants to celebrate. he roars “rave on mic christopher, rave on Kahlil Gibran, rave on…”
Same guy as the author?
nice idea emmet, forced slow down. i so often come home from work all stressed out, determined to relax but have no “plan” in place so i spend most of my evening worrying about what i should be doing to calm down. it’s an ellusive search that more often than not ends up browsing familiar websites, pacing the same streets… peace is never found and i go to bed with a sense of failure from not having found what i wanted.
maybe your idea could grow into a method.
February 1st, 2006 at 8:27 pm
My dad read “the prophet” to me when I was growing up, from about 5 years old onward. It’s kinda written indelibly into my psyche, and although a lot of it is questionable, it’s good to ponder everything Gibran has to say nonetheless.
The kernals of his method and ideas can be found in other writings: Anthony DeMello’s “Awareness”, the unknown author of the life changing text “Desiderata”, the Tao Te Ching, Benjamin Hoff. It’s so close to Taoism, in fact, that I find myself a practioner of that religion primarliy due to that experience as a youngster.
I love the idea, Emmett. I’ll read everyone, (if only i could figure out how RSS works!)
N
February 2nd, 2006 at 12:31 am
Thanks for the references Nick, I’ll check some of them out. Is this the “Desiderata” text that you refer to?
February 2nd, 2006 at 12:37 am
… more often than not ends up browsing familiar websites…
… if only i could figure out how RSS works!
Just wanted to note a (tenuous) common thread between your two comments: you could avoid losing time to aimless web browsing by subscribing to RSS feeds that deliver the content of websites to you as they are updated. The content comes to you instead of you having to seek it out, and it maybe not being there.
For more info on RSS see here.
(Of course, we could get into the lamentable loss of aesthetics that reading all of your online content in an email-style application leads to, but that’s a whole other blog post.)
And yes, it’s the same guy that Glen Hansard namechecks.
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:09 pm
Har! I always thought Desiderata was an anonymous text, written in the 1600s! Hmmm, maybe someone hijacked the copyright? Anyway…
Yeah, I downloaded a RSS reader, and I understand the concept, but I just couldn’t get it to work, even after clicking on the wee RSS box on bbc.co.uk, sfgate.com and other websites I enjoy. :-( Maybe a few pointers in an email, emmet, if you have the time!
June 16th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
[...] Samuel Pepy’s diary has been published as a blog since 2003. Bible RSS feeds for your daily scriptures (see also Blogging the Bible by David Plotz on Slate). It’s Bloomsday, but is reading Ulysses a page a day via RSS any more manageable than the dead tree version? Steven Wright and Jenny Holzer are rocking opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum over on Twitter (never before, I think, has a medium been put to such perfectly apt use). Each day last February I posted the 28 chapters of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. [...]