SILENT SORROW - The broken wings

My neighbours, you remember the dawn of youth with pleasure and regret its passing; but I remember it like a
prisoner who recalls the bars and shackles of his jail. You speak of those years between infancy and youth as a
golden era free from confinement and cares, but I call those years an era of silent sorrow which dropped as a
seed into my heart and grew with it and could find no outlet to the world of Knowledge and wisdom until love
came and opened the heart's doors and lighted its corners. Love provided me with a tongue and tears. You
people remember the gardens and orchids and the meeting places and street corners that witnessed your games
and heard your innocent whispering; and I remember, too, the beautiful spot in North Lebanon. Every time I
close my eyes I see those valleys full of magic and dignity and those mountains covered with glory and
greatness trying to reach the sky. Every time I shut my ears to the clamour of the city I hear the murmur of the
rivulets and the rustling of the branches. All those beauties which I speak of now and which I long to see, as a
child longs for his mother's breast, wounded my spirit, imprisoned in the darkness of youth, as a falcon suffers
in its cage when it sees a flock of birds flying freely in the spacious sky. Those valleys and hills fired my
imagination, but bitter thoughts wove round my heart a net of hopelessness.
Every time I went to the fields I returned disappointed, without understanding the cause of my
disappointment. Every time I looked at the grey sky I felt my heart contract. Every time I heard the singing of
the birds and babbling of the spring I suffered without understanding the reason for my suffering. It is said
that unsophistication makes a man empty and that emptiness makes him carefree. It may be true among those
who were born dead and who exist like frozen corpses; but the sensitive boy who feels much and knows little
is the most unfortunate creature under the sun, because he is torn by two forces. the first force elevates him
and shows him the beauty of existence through a cloud of dreams; the second ties him down to the earth and
fills his eyes with dust and overpowers him with fears and darkness.

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.
Solitude is the ally of sorrow as well as a companion of spiritual exaltation.
The boy's soul undergoing the buffeting of sorrow is like a white lily just unfolding. It trembles before the
breeze and opens its heart to day break and folds its leaves back when the shadow of night comes. If that boy
does not have diversion or friends or companions in his games his life will be like a narrow prison in which he
sees nothing but spider webs and hears nothing but the crawling of insects.
That sorrow which obsessed me during my youth was not caused by lack of amusement, because I could have
had it; neither from lack of friends, because I could have found them. That sorrow was caused by an inward
ailment which made me love solitude. It killed in me the inclination for games and amusement. It removed
from my shoulders the wings of youth and made me like a pong of water between mountains which reflects in
its calm surface the shadows of ghosts and the colours of clouds and trees, but cannot find an outlet by which
to pass singing to the sea.
Thus was my life before I attained the age of eighteen. That year is like a mountain peak in my life, for it
awakened knowledge in me and made me understand the vicissitudes of mankind. In that year I was reborn
and unless a person is born again his life will remain like a blank sheet in the book of existence. In that year, I
saw the angels of heaven looking at me through the eyes of a beautiful woman. I also saw the devils of hell
raging in the heart of an evil man. He who does not see the angels and devils in the beauty and malice of life
will be far removed from knowledge, and his spirit will be empty of affection.

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FOREWORD - The Broken Wings

FOREWORD
I was eighteen years of age when love opened my eyes with its magic rays and touched my spirit for the first
time with its fiery fingers, and Selma Karamy was the first woman who awakened my spirit with her beauty
and led me into the garden of high affection, where days pass like dreams and nights like weddings.
Selma Karamy was the one who taught me to worship beauty by the example of her own beauty and revealed
to me the secret of love by her affection; se was the one who first sang to me the poetry of real life.
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 in spite of all the bitterness of its mystery.
In every young man's life there is a "Selma" who appears to him suddenly while in the spring of life and
transforms his solitude into happy moments and fills the silence of his nights with music.
I was deeply engrossed in thought and contemplation and seeking to understand the meaning of nature and the
revelation of books and scriptures when I heard LOVE whispered into my ears through Selma's lips. My life
was a coma, empty like that of Adam's in Paradise, when I saw Selma standing before me like a column of
light. She was the Eve of my heart who filled it with secrets and wonders and made me understand the
meaning of life.
The first Eve led Adam out of Paradise by her own will, while Selma made me enter willingly into the
paradise of pure love and virtue by her sweetness and love; but what happened to the first man also happened
to me, and the fiery word which chased Adam out of Paradise was like the one which frightened me by its
glittering edge and forced me away from paradise of my love without having disobeyed any order or tasted the
fruit of the forbidden tree.


Today, after many years have passed, I have 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.
Oh, friends of my youth who are scattered in the city of Beirut, when you pass by the cemetery near the pine
forest, enter it silently and walk slowly so the tramping of your feet will not disturb the slumber of the dead,
and stop humbly by Selma's tomb and greet the earth that encloses her corpse and mention my name with
deep sigh and say to yourself, "here, all the hopes of Gibran, who is living as prisoner of love beyond the seas,
were buried. On this spot he lost his happiness, drained his tears, and forgot his smile."
By that tomb grows Gibran's sorrow together with the cypress trees, and above the tomb his spirit flickers
every night commemorating Selma, joining the branches of the trees in sorrowful wailing, mourning and
lamenting the going of Selma, who, yesterday was a beautiful tune on the lips of life and today is a silent
secret in the bosom of the earth.
Oh, comrades of my youth! I appeal to you in the names of those virgins whom your hearts have loved, to lay
a wreath of flowers on the forsaken tomb of my beloved, for the flowers you lay on Selma's tomb are like
falling drops of dew for the eyes of dawn on the leaves of withering rose.

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