Between May and the Men of Letters... From the Correspondence of May and Gibran

Wali al-Din Yakan
Gibran Khalil Gibran
Ameen Rihani
Julia Tu'mah Dimashqiyah

What was there between Gibran and May?

Gibran and May never met on this earth; between them were sands and seas, then seas and sands...
But what lay between them, through their correspondence, may well be among the strongest bonds that can arise between a man and a woman..

Did Gibran love "May"?

Did May love Gibran?

And was their feeling mixed with anything of the earth's dust? Is it true that Gibran wrote to May inviting her to marriage, and that she refused? And is it true that "May" in turn wrote to the great genius inviting him to marriage, and that he answered her, saying: "I am ill, May"? These are all things that remain in the keeping of the unseen, for Gibran died and said nothing, and May died and said nothing... What is certain is that the relation that grew between them was lofty and strong, passing beyond the bounds of friendship to the love that arises between souls.

Here are some of these letters between May and Gibran.

Six or seven weeks passed without my writing, because I kept saying to myself, "We must stop here." But we did not stop; we took a step — rather, we took a leap worth recording in the lyric song. I was in Alexandria, facing the sea that invites meditation and nurtures the love of solitude, and I did not wish to give the meaning of the song any grave importance. So I wrote saying that I wanted our correspondence to be confined to intellectual subjects, and I told you frankly that I seek in your letters the benefit I seek everywhere. You set me down as "guilty" in your notebook and rose to complain that whenever you "gazed at a thing I hid it behind the mask, and whenever you stretched out a hand I pierced it with a nail." Yes, I did that, and I did it deliberately. I deliberately "cut those hidden threads which the hand of the unseen spins and stretches between thought and thought, between soul and soul," and I took to twisting meanings and deforming questions and laughing at the words that fill the eyes with tears. And what other means had I to turn you away from that subject, and to remind you that I am my parents' only child? In a Western family there may be but one boy, and they fling him from England to India; or one girl, and she travels from France to China without stir or clamor. But what have we to do with those people, we who are Easterners?

I did it deliberately, above all to spare myself a torment I can well do without, and to shun every word that might bring me near that subject which has filled my soul with thorns and brambles these past years. You understood what I wanted, but not in its true meaning; you understood it in a way I did not intend. Then pride assailed you — a man's pride — and you forgot that silence in this fashion does not become us, we who have always written to each other as two thinking friends. You forgot that the other subject came by chance, and since it was not the root, it could have faded away without affecting our literary and intellectual relations. Or were they right who said that friendship between man and woman is the fourth of the impossibles?

Your silence of this kind pained me and sharpened my attention, turning me toward points none of them pleasing: among them, that you did not share my contentment in that intellectual friendship, for had you been as happy in it as I was, you would not have aimed beyond it. I learned that I was alone where I had thought us two. I judged that you had reckoned it no more than a "preface," while I valued it for its own sake. The meaning of your silence became, to me, "either that or nothing" — and you know best what effect this has upon me. — Egypt, December 6, 1920.

... Gibran, I have written all these pages laughing, to avoid saying that you are my beloved, to avoid the word love. In those who do not trade in the outward show of love and its claims at soirées and dance-halls and gatherings, love grows in their depths into a terrible dynamite force; they might envy those who scatter their feelings in surface glitter, because those do not suffer the pressure of feelings that have never exploded — and yet they envy the others

... And what shall I say of a man whom God sets between two women: a woman who turns his dreams into waking, and a woman who turns his waking into dreams? What shall I say of a heart that God places between two lamps?

What shall I say of this man?

Is he melancholy? ... Is he happy? ... Is he a stranger to this world? I do not know. But I ask you whether you wish him to remain a stranger to you..

Is he a stranger, with no one in all existence who knows a word of the language of his soul? I do not know. But I ask you whether you do not wish to speak to him in that language — you who know it best of all.

Are you not also a stranger to this world? Are there many in this world who understand the language of your soul?

You and I, May, are among those whom life has favored with friends and lovers and disciples. But tell me: is there among those jealous, devoted ones anyone to whom we can say, Come, then, carry ... my cross — at their ease, without wishing it for themselves; they prefer their solitude, and prefer silence, and prefer to lead their hearts astray from what is laid up in them and to divert themselves with what has nothing to do with feeling; they prefer any exile and any misery (and is there any misery or exile apart from the solitude of the heart?) to contenting themselves with the scanty drops.

What is the meaning of this that I write? I do not know what I mean by it. But I know that you are my beloved, and that I fear love. I expect much of love, and so I fear it may not bring me all that I expect. I say this knowing that a little love is much. But the little, in love, does not content me. Drought and barrenness and nothing at all are better than a meager pittance.

How I dare confide this to you, and how I let it slip, I do not know. Thank God I write it on paper and do not utter it aloud; for were you present now in the flesh, I should flee in shame after such words and hide for a long while, and I would not let you see me until you had forgotten. Even writing — today I sometimes begrudge it to myself, because in it I am free with all this freedom.

Do you remember the saying of the Easterners of old, that it is better for a girl neither to read nor to write? Saint Thomas appears here. And what I show here is not merely the trace of heredity; it is something farther back than heredity. What is it?

You tell me — what is this? And tell me whether I am astray or on the right path. For I trust you, and I believe, as a matter of course, everything we say. And whether I am wrong or not wrong, my heart goes out toward you, and the best that is in me keeps hovering about you, guarding you and tending you.

The sun has set behind the horizon, and through the wondrous clouds and shapes and colors a bright star has shone forth. One star: Venus, the goddess of love. Do you suppose it is inhabited, like our earth, by human beings who love and long? Perhaps there is on it one like me, who has her one Gibran — sweet, far, far away, who is the near, near one. She writes to him now while twilight fills the sky, and she knows that darkness follows twilight, and that light follows darkness, and that night will succeed day, and day follow night, many times over before she sees the one she loves. And so all the desolation of twilight and all the desolation of night steal into her, and she casts the pen aside to take refuge from the desolation in a single name: Gibran. — Egypt, January 15, 1924.

For one single day? Is there any among them who knows that behind our songs there is a song that voices cannot imprison and strings cannot make tremble? Is there any among them who knows the joy in our sadness and the sadness in our joy?

You say to me: you are an artist and a poet, and you ought to be content, because you are an artist and a poet. But, May, I am no artist and no poet. I have spent my days painting and writing, but I am not in my days and my nights.

I am mist, May — mist that covers things but does not become one with them. I am mist that has never condensed into drops. I am mist, and in the mist is my solitude; in it is my aloneness and my desolation, in it my hunger and my thirst. And my calamity is that the mist, which is my reality, longs to meet another mist in the sky, and longs to hear someone say: "You are not alone; 'we are two'; I know who you are."

Tell me, May: is there in your parts anyone who can and will say to me: "I am another mist, O mist; come, let us settle upon the mountains and in the valleys; come, let us walk among the trees and above them; come, let us flood the lofty rocks; come, let us enter together into the hearts of creatures and into their cells; come, let us roam those far, inaccessible, unknown places." Say, May

Do you remember, May, your telling me once that a journalist in Buenos Aires had written you a letter asking what journalists usually ask: your kind portrait?

I have thought more than once of that journalist's request, and each time I said to myself: I am no journalist, therefore I will not ask what journalists usually ask. No, I am no journalist. Were I the owner of a magazine or the editor of a newspaper, I would have asked for the portrait freely and simply, without shame and without timidity and without a preamble composed of trembling words. No, I am no journalist — so what am I to do?

Is there in your parts anyone who will and can say to me even one word of these words?

"And it is as though May had asked him about his dress, for he says to her:"

And what is the color of the suit I am wearing today? It is one of my habits to wear two suits at once: a suit of the weavers' weaving and the tailors' sewing, and a suit of flesh and blood and bone. Today, however, I am wearing a single garment, long and loose, bearing the traces of ink and colors; on the whole it differs from the dress of the dervishes only in its cleanliness.

I hate the clothes of the men of the West, for they are without meter or rhyme; and if I return to the East I shall wear nothing but the old Eastern garments.

"And she asked about smoking, and how many cigarettes he had lit since morning, and he answered:"

How sweet this question is, and how hard it is to answer! This is a smoking day: since its morning I have burned a million cigarettes (it was seven hundred cigarettes, but he struck that out). Smoking, for me, is a pleasure, not a compelling habit; a whole week may pass without my smoking a single cigarette. I said I have burned a million cigarettes — and the fault is yours; you are the one to blame, for had I been alone in this valley I would never have come back.

As for my study, it is still without roof or walls; and as for the seas of sand and the seas of ether, they are as they were yesterday — deep, many-waved, and without shores. As for the sail of the ship in which I plunge through these seas, it is still unspread. Can you spread the sail of my ship?

And he says to her in another letter: Would that I were ill in Egypt! Would that I were ill, free of any regimen, in my own country, near those I love.

Do you know, May, that every morning and every evening I see myself in a house on the outskirts of Cairo, and I see you seated opposite me, reading the latest article I have written, or the latest of your own articles not yet published?