Memories of May

(What are your most beautiful memories of May, and when did you last see her, and what was your last acquaintance with her?)

He answered me: Perhaps the most lasting of May's traces in my soul is that she used to speak to me of certain of my passing thoughts with the speech of one who understood them and grasped their aims and their purposes; she would declare to me frankly her admiration for those thoughts, and this frank declaration of admiration was repeated every time I met her — which showed me her artistic taste and her intellectual bent. And I took comfort in the admiration she showed, not out of any triumph in praise or delight in flattery, but for something loftier in value and further in aim than that: because this admiration, in which I could see her truthfulness and sincerity and its distance from the ornament of speech and the falsehood of hypocrisy, showed, at the very least, that we were in accord in the meanings we wrote about and the paths we followed.

May was truthful in her praise of my style and my writing; I knew that truthfulness in her and could discern it, and feel it in every word she said to me or phrase she wrote to me — indeed, she wrote to me something that betokens this in one of her private letters.

My last memory of her is that she visited me at Dar al-Kutub after her final return from Lebanon, in the company of a gracious Lebanese Emira; we fell to exchanging talk, ranging in our speech down many paths, until the conversation — and conversation has its chains of sorrows — led to my feelings at the loss of my son. And I sensed, in the course of the talk, that May was sincerely sharing this deep feeling with me. It was as though the fates had sent her at that hour to lighten the anguish I feel whenever the memory of my son is stirred.

Then she began to take, in her talk, directions closer to philosophy than to sentiment — closer to perplexity in understanding the decrees of fate and destiny than to submission to inevitable reality and irrevocable decree.

May was then in Syria, in a cruel seclusion and an exhausting solitude, after pains and sorrows had leagued against her, and misgivings and delusions had made themselves her allies — of which the gracious readers know the story from its own time. I was visiting Syria in that period, and I wished to meet her; but she, in her seclusion, would receive no one and would meet no human being. Ameen Rihani told me something of her, and informed me that she was near him, at Freikeh.

And I should like here, while I am speaking of May's memory, to join to her memory in her seclusion my meeting with Ameen Rihani, which left a pleasant trace in my soul.

Rihani has died, and gone to the goal toward which every living thing goes; and May died after him, as the flower dies after it had opened with hope, fragrant with perfume, moist with fresh dew.

And had Rihani lived after May, and had it been decreed that his steps toward eternity should be resumed after hers, perhaps he would have been the man best entitled to speak of her, and the worthiest of them to recount to the men of letters the story of May's striving and her struggle in the cause of realizing her high ideals.