The Farewell

‘The Prophet’ by Kahlil Gibran

Published in 1923, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet has been one of the world’s widely read and translated literary pieces. It’s a compelling read, one that would bring you to the imaginary yet familiar city of Orphalese with its hills, valleys, and fields of wildflowers. In the words of Almustafa, the Lebanese poet speaks about the timeless truths affecting human life from the moment of his birth to the time of his death.

Sometime ago I gave the book to someone. She said it was beautiful, and my attempts at poetry sucked to death. A few farewells later, I saw her again inside a bookstore. Nothing much had changed in her, or maybe she gained a few more pounds, but I would lie to her about it. She was as beautiful as ever. Like a thief, I hid behind the shelves to peek over at the titles she was buying. Somehow I wished to find The Prophet in her hands although I knew only a few fools would buy a book they’d already read.

She reminds me of the last lines from Kahlil Gibran’s poem on love: “To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;/ To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;/ To return home at eventide with gratitude;/ And to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.”

There’s always someone whose eyes, lips, and the way she smiles or reads a book will forever be etched in our memory. Farewell is not about forgetting the past but keeping memories that give us depth. Love, Gibran writes, should not end in bitterness but with “a song of praise upon your lips.”

The character of Almitra, Almustafa’s beloved, was based on Mary Elizabeth Haskell. Like Almustafa and Almitra, Gibran and Haskell did not end up together. After their farewell, Gibran pursued his artistic calling, while she married another man. At 48, he died in New York City on April 10, 1931. He didn’t marry.

In his will, Gibran left the contents of his art studio to Haskell where she discovered all her letters to him spanning 23 years. Along with his letters to her, which she had also kept, she gave them to a university library in North Carolina. Old and gray-haired, Haskell traveled to Gibran’s beloved country and buried him among the cedars of Lebanon, thereby fulfilling the poet’s, like Almustafa’s, final wish: to sail home to the isle of his birth.

In return, Khalil Gibran immortalized Haskell in The Prophet. She was the beautiful Almitra walking in the fields of Orphalese in summer afternoons, and after Almustafa’s departure, she was a vision of a young woman in love, standing alone at the harbor, “silent, gazing after the ship until it had vanished into the mist.”

Despite the farewell, the story shows, there are things that do not end.