Estrangement, or the Unity of Being

I know of no book in the prose literature of the Arabs so flooded with desolation and estrangement as Darkness and Rays is flooded. You take it up article by article and line by line, and you come out of them all with smoke in your hands, and before your eyes a pensive face, gazing at you gaunt, dried out by solitude, stung by isolation, wasted by a longing for the unknown. These are the souls of the strangers in this world: tenderness is cut off between them and the people of the earth, so they grow used to solitude, and of all the states of existence nothing gives them birth but it. Their solitude gives them birth, and the pain they meet in their solitude gives them birth, and they refuse to come out of their shell. Their estrangement among mankind grows sweet to them, and so they live yearning, eyeing the universe, enfeebled by the perfumes of deep sorrow.

These are the first signs of the strangeness that people called “abnormality” in May, and that I have called “estrangement.” The end to which she came does not concern me;

I only maintain that what was in her was nothing but a natural extension, and a necessary completion, of her sense of the emptiness of earthly existence. And it happened that this sick feeling developed into a passing mood, and the passing mood turned permanent, and a rupture arose between the life of society and her. The rupture led to pain, and pain to despair, and despair to that long silence in which she found rest shortly before the end. Those who suffer love to adopt for themselves towers of ivory, in which they take refuge, descending to the life of men only in glimpses. And these glimpses that brought May back to the ordinary run of life are the very flashes in which the anguished one comes out of the fog into the light, from obscurity into clarity, from the darkness of earth and the tomb of this world into the clear radiance of heaven and the spaciousness of the Lord—the same glimpses that Dostoevsky knew just before his seizure would come upon him.

And May, too, was one of those with “towers.”

May — Death has stripped the matter from us, and we have returned from the land of the afflicted to the circle of the divine emanation.

Gibran — And we shall not return to the world. For in it we attained the man-god, and the mission is complete. And were our pains on earth anything but a longing for this return?

May — From the shading palms, on the bank of the Nile, I called out to you: I am a stranger in the land of strangers, and a breath of the most luminous emanations in the darkness of the dust. And I cried to you, “Let me count for you the burdens that have bowed my shoulder,” “and I used to weep before you while you did not know...” And I would say: “I have need of pain—is there no one among men who is skilled at tormenting me?...” But my heart remained solitary, and I stayed “alone, I...” And I went about proclaiming to men that we are the prisoners of our names, “known by them as prisoners are known by their numbers.” And they answer: And what lies in the unseen? And what comes after the release from prison? “Whence and whither?” “Whence and whither?”

Until there came an agony which over there they call death, and which here we call abiding. Then I beheld the hand of the Greatest Spirit “casting me... into the space of infinity, and two strong wings bear me to where I find death an accidental event, and annihilation a fading phantom.” Then I saw my being “grow and rise and become great, and it breathes in the air of the life that reigns everywhere...” “For we are but a part of the all-embracing creation,” “we immortalize life with our singing, and it sings to us with its immortality.”

. . .

Words by May

“Be Happy”

If you are a man, be happy! For in the gallantry of manhood the greater meaning of life takes body. And if you are a woman, be happy! For woman is man's song, her nobility is the place of his reliance, her sweetness the storehouse of his consolation, and her smile the reward of his toils.

Darkness and Rays