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ReconsiderationsFor 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 writin ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 December 2007, on page 35 Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-false-prophet-3710
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