On Banovo brdo, the long-delayed spring finally shows its bright face - the bushes have imperceptibly turned their leaves. The pinched blossoms on the branches of the trees between the buildings open to soak up the sun. In the air is that breath of joy that I have known since childhood: exhilaration at the coming day, joy at the flourishing of life and the awakening of bugs and plants. Is it beauty?
With children, we aim for eternity
I reach for a book that I haven't read in a long time and I read that beauty "is not a picture you would like to see, nor a song you would like to hear, But a sight you see even when you close your eyes, and a song you hear even when you close your ears".
Halil Jubran in his iconic book Prorok, says this in the chapter "On Beauty". And he adds: "People of Orphalis, beauty is life, when life removes the veil from its holy face." Spring seems to lift the veil from my world.
I feel like saying to the screaming children under the window: We, parents, are "bows from which children shoot like arrows". And with that, according to Džubran, we are aiming for eternity.
Or: "People of Ban's hill, Džubran is right, life is, despite everything, beautiful, life is beauty". I'm just afraid that they'll look at me strangely. That's why I continue to write about Khalil Jubran, a man who knew how to talk about beauty, and he died on April 10, 1931, 90 years ago. Contemporaries say that the way of departure was not nice. But which way is it?
Child of the Lebanese Highlands
The place where he was born on January 6, 1883 was called Bšari. The Russian transcription adds one "e" - Bešari, and the German and Spanish one "i" - Bišari. High in the Lebanon Mountains, this town and its surroundings are a fortress of the Maronite faith. It is about an old Christian community that arose in the 7th century by separating from the Syrian Orthodox Church. In the 10th century, Maronites flee from Sunni persecution from Syria to Lebanon. During the Crusades, they built increasingly intense contact with Rome, with which they have been in union since the 15th century.
The Maronites consider themselves the heirs of the Phoenicians, the inventors of the phonetic alphabet. Aramaic was spoken in the area until the 19th century. To recall, it was the language of the Talmud, parts of the Old Testament and the mother tongue of Jesus Christ. laban in Aramaic it means white. That language also sleeps in the name of the country of Lebanon. Along with other Christian communities in the area, the Maronite Christians are the only major Christian group in the Middle Eastern Islamic Sea. There are about a million of them in Lebanon alone. When they speak Arabic, Lebanese Christians from this region do so with a distinct Aramaic accent.
The total inheritance of the beautiful and difficult centuries of this community was waiting for the boy who was baptized with the name Jubran Khalil Jubran bin Mihail bin Saad.
A close friend in God's forest
I can imagine little Halil - the name in Arabic, they say, means faithful, close friend - growing up in his town at 1.400 meters above sea level. As if from an eagle's nest, he looks at the Kadisha Valley - the Holy Valley - the deep gorge of the Kadisha River, where some of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world are swarming. He listens to the old men speaking in the language of Jesus, in the shade of the ancient Lebanese cedars, rare trees that have survived merciless felling. They are called God's Cedars. Some of them are 3.000 years old. It is surrounded by an ancient community that is said to be imbued with cordiality, hospitality, but also highland, warrior patriotism. I suspect that these characteristics, similar to those of the Dinaric, during the Lebanese civil war produced similar results to our nineties.
Halil's parents, his father, who has the same name as him, and his mother, Kamila, a priest's daughter, are not wealthy. Nevertheless, a Maronite priest teaches the boy Arabic and the Bible.
We are all used to Islamic prayers in Arabic. Halil listened to that throaty, melodious language in Christian prayers. He was born in the Ottoman Empire not even a quarter of a century after the introduction of a certain autonomy for Lebanese Christians, under the pressure of France, and after the civil war in which the Druze killed ten thousand Maronites.
Going to America
Father was a pharmacist and - a gambler. You know how it goes. Obdan earns money by selling a mixture of headache powder and tincture, and at night the devil takes the money. He also started working in the city administration. The accusation of embezzlement came quickly, all his property was confiscated, he had to go to prison for a while. The mother tries to save the children from suffering - she leaves in 1895 with Halil, his half-brother and his two sisters to the United States of America.
In Boston, his mother worked as a seamstress, Halil went to an American school. One teacher immediately noticed the imagination and giftedness of the boy from faraway Lebanon. His drawings caught his attention. He showed them to photographer and publisher Frank Holland Day, who is credited with developing art photography. Day, who was extremely unconventional for his time, helped poor immigrant children master the language. He influenced the free development of the boy's talents.
Later, Halil, who experienced poverty from childhood, would write: "And there are those who have little, but give it all." These are the ones who believe in life and its abundance, and that's why their chest is never empty".
Halil is not given to settle in Boston, his life will not flow in a straight line.
Between Beirut and Boston
In 1897, Halil's family sent him back to Lebanon. In Beirut, he will improve his Arabic at a Maronite school, then study French and art. Via Paris, he returns to Boston after a few years. The mother is sick with tuberculosis. On that fateful day in 1903, first his mother died, then his sister Sultana and half-brother Boutros. Only his sister Marijana is left, who supports him by working in a tailor's shop. Under the name Halil Jubran, he publishes the first essays in Arabic in Lebanon, followed by poems. Publishes the first books in Arabic in America. But he experienced real success in 1904 as a painter. He meets Mary Elizabeth Haskell, who sees a genius in him. They were engaged for a while, but Halil broke off the relationship. She married someone else, but she helped him for the rest of her life. They corresponded regularly. In 1908, he began to study art and European literature in Paris. He has lived in New York since 1910. Until 1918, he wrote in Arabic, and then switched to English. A few years after that, in 1923, he published the work for which he will be remembered: Prophet.
The most read book after the Bible
The artistic triumph of the boy from the Lebanon Highlands was inevitable. What he brought to America and to the English language, America did not have - two millennia of indigenous Christianity, interweaving with Islam, Judaism, Sufism. Mysticism that has a natural flow like mountain water. In the Lebanese home of his parents, all people of good will were welcome, regardless of the religion they professed. Džubran knew the painful history of conflicts between religious communities in his homeland. His synthetic mysticism was based on the knowledge that the complete equality of all faiths is the way out of the madness of religious exclusivity.
It is difficult to describe exactly what the book is Prorok. Some say there are 26 pictorial essays. Others speak of aphoristic poems in prose.
Elvis Presley did not separate himself from this book. John Lennon used his lyrics in his songs. Johnny Cash made music for one of his works. The Prophet has been translated into 40 languages.
"I'm alive like you..."
Halil Džubran died in 1931 at the age of 48 from tuberculosis and cirrhosis of the liver. Ever since its release A prophet he drank more and more, sometimes locking himself in his New York apartment for days at a time. Maybe that Lebanese boy was crushed by life between continents. Maybe the curse of fame got to him. Maybe, like his father, he carried the fate of an addict inside him. He wanted to be buried in Lebanon. Mary Elizabeth and his sister Mariana bought the Lebanese monastery Mar Sarkis, he was buried there. Today it is the Dzubran Museum. He wished to have an epitaph written for him during his lifetime: "I am alive like you and I stand next to you." Close your eyes and look around you, you will see me in front of you". His wish was fulfilled. He believed that at the end of life the game is just beginning: "And when the earth asks for your limbs, only then will you really play".
Everything he created, including manuscripts and studios, Khalil Jubran bequeathed to Mary Elizabeth. Flipping through stacks of papers in the studio, she realized that Džubran had saved all her letters during 23 years of correspondence. Before she died in 1964, she gave them, along with the letters she received from Djubran, to the University of North Carolina. This testimony of the deep connection between two human beings was published in 1972 under the title Dear prophet.
The prophet on Ban's hill
Spring renews my neighborhood, changes the gray world into green. I remember such days decades ago. A book on his chest, a pensive view of the leafy poplars. They flickered so gently - as if they were forcing me to recognize the "pain of too much tenderness", that's what Džubran called love.
On TV, some people are protesting against injustice. Džubran tells them: "And if you want to overthrow the despot from the throne, make sure first to overthrow the throne set up in yourselves." That's right, Halil, brother, it says something in me.
Džubran is one of those who, like Tarkovsky, shows the way outside the canon to people for whom the church is too narrow: "When you pray, you ascend in order to meet in the air those who are praying at the same time, and who, except in prayer, may not you would meet”. Halil Jubran loved women. They loved him too. He knew how to play the harp: “And your body is the harp of your soul. And it's up to you whether you want to elicit a gentle concert from him, or confused sounds".
He believed that his eternal being was where he built a temple of words. So he is here now, after so many years, with me again, on an April morning on Ban's hill.
Bonus video:
