The Prophet Motive

In the early nineteen-seventies young women who dabbled in the counterculture from a hygienic distance kept a copy of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gilbran, on their nightstands. That era coincided with my college years, and I can’t recall ever seeing a man in possession of Gibran’s soporific little volume, and I don’t remember ever seeing a woman actually read Gibran. Owning it, keeping it close, was enough. If they fancied themselves bookish, some of these same women filled out their one-shelf library with Richard Brautigan, Hermann Hesse and Vonnegut. Pitiful stuff.

In the December issue of The New Criterion, Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) performs one of his patented hatchet jobs on the newly published Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran. Here’s a sample:

“Gibran’s great weakness—a profound moral failing—was a cowardly refusal to confront the ambiguities, paradoxes, and refractoriness of life, preferring instead the illusory comforts of a vague, saccharine, and undemanding goodwill. His outlook was partly Christian in inspiration, partly pagan; indeed, nothing spiritual, in a Californian guru’s sense of the word, was alien to him. He was, in fact, a founding father of the New Age school of charlatanry.”