The Lofty Beacon of the East!!

In the special issue that "The Woman's Voice" published in memory of "Mayy," many readers were arrested by a delightful article by Miss Rose Ghorayeb, in which she analyzed with graceful concision Mayy's literary personality and drew for us the unique atmosphere in which she lived, whose delights were among the causes of that mighty leap; and she concluded by saying that Mayy's era was the era of the flowering of Lebanese letters outside Lebanon — an era that has come and gone, leaving the Lebanese writer no refuge but his mountains and his shores.

It pleases "The Woman's Voice" that Mr. Salah Labaki should raise "the question of the Lebanese writer" and "the thorns of Lebanese letters," so that his idea and Miss Ghorayeb's idea meet — but he points us to the remedy for this malady: the founding of a publishing house for the Lebanese book. Here follows Mr. Labaki's mature article.

Our country is the country of light, the country of learning, the lofty beacon of the East, the crossing-place of civilizations from one far end of the earth to the other, and the seat of the leadership of thought in the East.

Such are the anthems we sing of our country. But are they anything more than legends woven by imagination and finished by longing? Are they anything but an expression of what we aspire to? We know that Lebanon, on this side of the Mediterranean, can never be first in the two arenas of industry and agriculture; so if we are to aspire, it is unthinkable that we should aspire to a Lebanon that is nothing but the fan of the East! We have an ambition that nothing can satisfy but looking toward a sublime goal that abides forever in the far frontiers, where thought is bent upon itself. And we were helped to this splendid dream by the fact that the foreign scholarly missions established in Beirut two universities which soon became two factories producing educated youth and distributing it over the whole Arab East, and by the fact that God bestowed on certain individuals among us a reed-pipe that sings or a quill that tells tales, so that it took root among us, and took root among our neighbors, that our country is the country of light and beauty.

Yet if we examine the facts and look at them closely, we are appalled to find that this reputation of ours lives on a past glory that has been cut off, or nearly so.

The universities! What do they graduate for us today? Physicians, chemists, engineers, and lawyers — all practitioners, most of whom have made the profession a trade. And no blame attaches to them. For here there are no laboratories and no budgets that permit specialization and open the way to discovery, creation, and invention.

Our men of learning, whom fortune does not allow to devote themselves to science abroad, are laborers in the temple of knowledge — trumpets, repeaters, and re-echoers, not men of learning.

Yesterday I read a news item to the effect that England today boasts before the world of being first in heart surgery. And what do we boast of before the world?

We boast that it contains countries worse off than our own. Even in this field our victories are negative ones, wherein we pride ourselves that we are not lower than the lowest.

We must make of Lebanon a university homeland, possessing universities equipped with the latest that science has attained, capable of opening the way to experiment and to discovery; or else let us aid the two universities, the American and the French, with an aid that will enable them to shoulder this task. As for money for projects such as these — speak not of it. He who has drunk the sea will think little of the brooks. And our administrations drink the sea every day to no purpose.

As for letters and the arts, it was our right to stand, or to march, in the vanguard among those who have carried their torches in the Arab countries. For by the mere fact of our being on this shore, we possess unique, interwoven qualities of suppleness, of openness, and of aptitude for acquiring. When we look out upon the wellsprings of thought, we find no embarrassment in drawing from their source; rather we feel that we gave the world much in the past and take from it today by way of recovery; rather we feel that the debtor in this arena is no less honorable than the creditor; rather that in it there is neither creditor nor debtor — it is the vast wealth belonging, all of it, to every human being.

What, then, is it that holds our procession back from the vanguard?

Our writers and our men of art must be given the conditions of production: a freedom with which the writer can express all the subjects of thought, and a market in which works of authorship and artistic craftsmanship do not go unsold.

The proofs are abundant of the extent of our readiness

for sacrifice, in defense of our absolute freedom of thought. It is enough to point to the exhaustion the press, for example, has suffered under the writ of administrative suspension, and to the steadfastness of our great journalist-writers in the face of the harsh sentences that have fallen upon them under the writ of the new press law, whether before the press court or before the military tribunal, for the proof of what we say to stand. Nor do we think that the authors among our writers hold back, out of fear or dread or awe, from proclaiming what they hold to be the truth.

There remains the other condition for the flowering of letters: the creation of the material possibilities that will allow the man of letters and the artist to devote himself to letters and to art. It must be intimated in this connection that the creation of these possibilities benefits at one and the same time the people of art and letters, and our cultural standing. Every book, every artistic work sold outside Lebanon, is a mantle of light whose radiance is reflected back upon us. Then too, writers and artists — once their livelihood is assured — apply themselves to themselves, to their society, and to humanity, with patience and with depth, so that they perceive the causes that lie behind the husks and behind appearances; and their expression of the impulses of souls, of their feelings and their thought, grows more truthful and more comprehensive.

The sound opinion — if our surmise is correct — is that the government should undertake to establish a great house for printing and publishing, publication here to include the promotion of all the works of the mind.

The project may cost much money and great pains. But the life of our minds and the satisfaction of our noble ambitions are worthier of care than the cutting of a road — worthier of care, that is, than our feet and the tires of our automobiles.