From the Corners of the Bookshops

From the corners of the bookshops I buy my books. I blow the dust off the works from which people have turned away; and it is in my nature to turn away where they flock, and to flock where they turn away. I shy from the puffing of any thing, and keep my distance from the "genius men of letters" and the "creative writers" and the "inspired poets" and the "sheikhs of criticism" and the "imams of eloquence," from the "literary masterpiece" and the "bombshell of the season," and all the other phrases, descriptions, and epithets bestowed on most of the books issued in these days. And I confess that I have never read one of these books set out in the bookshops' windows, resplendent in their typesetting and printing, without finding it tedious expositions which their author begins and then regrets, trying to slip free of the subject by whatever means he can — to say nothing of the affectation and the artifice, and their emptiness of any new idea, or of any precise inquiry bearing a close bond to mind and feeling within the circle of the soul, whether the book be poetry, or story, or criticism.

And the strangest thing in criticism is that you see the critic, for instance, who lays claim to the sheikhdom of letters, defaming whoever has fallen under his wrath, analyzing the features of his bodily shape and his character — while of his literature and its quality he says not a word. And with whoever enjoys his favor it is the exact reverse: praise, and appreciation, and genius. The calamity of literature among us is the dominion of money over most of our men of letters in what they produce and compose; and he who has no money, his valuable production dies, and if he does succeed in bringing it out, the corner of the bookshops will be its resting place. Even literature we have weighed in our mistaken scales and divided into two kinds: the literature of the moneyed writers, and the literature of the poor writers.

And from this corner, where the production of the poor writers lies sleeping, I look out at you this hour, dear reader, with Memoirs of a Wounded Man by Ustad Boulos Salama.

Memoirs of a Wounded Man is an edition brought out at its author's own expense, on flimsy paper, and its price does not exceed 150 piasters. It is the story of a wounded man of letters, who has written its chapters, up to this hour, himself. And is there any story greater than when a man tells you of his own soul — the stages of its faith and its unbelief, its love and its hope, and its many faces — making of it a laboratory from which he looks out upon the world with the best of life's experiments, whose bitterness he has tasted and whose burdens he has carried alone? A literary story in which he lays out before people the creeping of pain through his body, and the doctors' Sindbad-voyages in search of it, for fifteen years and up to this hour; and the calamities that came upon him — in Shakespeare's phrase — in battalions like armies, not as single spies like scouts; and the surgeons' scalpels in the wounds that have become caverns in his body.

Nailed to his bed without motion. The flower of his youth withered in the hospitals, and his lifeblood flowed upon the scalpels' edge. Yet he tells his story with a touch of playfulness now and then, and offers you the "entr'acte" sugared with gaiety and jokes, so that you do not weary of listening to the tragedy of pain. And out of these calamities which his body has suffered, and suffers still, a creative soul and a luminous mind look out upon us — a soul in which there is no trace of brokenness, or rancor, or ingratitude and unbelief in God, or despair and despondency; on the contrary, he calls upon people to understand and to grasp gladness, and delight, and hope. He is a giant who defied life and rebelled against it; calamities tightened his faith in God, and his luminous awareness of the Christianity in which he believed — as a reliance upon the spirit, as mercy and charity and forbearance and forgiveness, not as rites and statues and fanaticism, not even as an ornamented cross. For love comes before the cross, and were it not for love there would be no Christianity. His view of the universe, as regards man's existence, matches Nietzsche's view of man the thinker, the giant, the creator — the universe standing by its own essence; but he differs from him at the point where this universe which is man, in his phrase, comes into contact with God. And he inclines toward Rousseau in the relation of this giant man to society — Rousseau, who said: "Corruption came to men only by way of society," and who declared that society is the enemy of this man and the destroyer of the individual personality. Society corrupts, and subjugates man, and treats him as a machine at the will of a usurping individual, who — by force, or by charlatanry, or by eloquence — sets himself up as a leader and hides behind this society to perpetuate his personality, his domination, and his influence. At one time this society is called communism, Nazism, fascism; at another it calls itself God's own chosen people. And in all these cases he sees man suffering and the universe sinking down into the depths of his soul, and he will not allow racialism to lord it over the people. He did not want life as trade, and greed, and satiety upon satiety, and vanity, and palaces; he wanted it as an opening upon knowledge, an unveiling of the human self, an aspiration toward the creative spirit. Man is an end, not a means; he is a base of transformation for society, for humanity, and for the universe, rising above selfishness — man: the man of love and sacrifice, the thinking, reasoning man, who gives of his culture and his art light, not battleships and airplanes and machines. Culture is a building of minds, a preparing of hearts, a polishing of morals, an opening of souls — and an immortality in the nature of man. He defies death and does not fear it, because he sees in it one of the conditions of immortality; and the fear of it is the fear of the seaman who has not rigged his sails against drowning. And by his call to rig these sails of ours he reminds me of the holy verse, "Be watchful" — for man is joined, past to present to future.

And through these views, saturated with the oneness of God, he set out in company with St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine, and Bergson, and the other philosophers conscious, with a comprehensive consciousness, of the truth of existence and its bond with God and with man.

The pain presses hard upon him and the calamity looms terrible before him, and he sees Job, beside himself, as a dwarf before the pyramids. Job washed his feet in laban — but as for him, his soul has flowed upon the scalpels' edge for nineteen years.

And in the book, besides this man's rebellion and his revolt against people for people's sake, there is reproach. And a loneliness of soul. The friends he loved have forgotten him; not one of them has remembered him, none has consoled him with a visit, or a letter — not even a telephone call.

My companions! Are there in hardship any but a few
who kept my loyalty through the black onrush of calamities?

And he reproaches — and in his reproach is the revolt of friendship stabbed, and the pride of a great soul in its refusals and its pain; and a longing for death, for the release of his soul from his body — because death, in his belief, is an everlasting sleep, green with dreams, eternal in its raptures, its bliss waves of delights, and a cradle of serenity for a lifeblood that flowed upon the scalpels' edge and dyed their blades with its blood.

And the poet's defiance and resolve return to him, and he cries out with a heart gnawed by pain and a soul set aflame by faith:

"O God, this worldly life is the valley of tears, and the true philosophy is the philosophy of pain. Woe to him who gulps down pleasures cup after cup in dread of the truth. I thank Thee, O God, for Thou hast purified me with pains and smelted my soul in the crucible of torment, to take me pure unto Thee. My torment, beside Thy fire, is nothing worth the mention; and my whole life has been one great sin: Thou gavest me the enjoyment of health, and I turned aside to vanity. O God, Thy slaves are the free, and the free of this world are slaves. O God, make me a lesson to this rising generation which philosophizes about Thee, now with existence, now with the denial of Thy existence. I summon it to the laboratory of life, in which I have found no sweetness save from Thee and in Thee, for life has no meaning without Thee. Our short minds see but one side of life, and Thou seest all things. Thou art the everlasting, the eternal, the creator of time and of place. O God, I am hanging by a thread above this eternity. I implore Thy mercy, on the day Thou givest leave for it to be cut, that Thou shake me with a gentle shaking, that I may lift my eyes on high, and then close my eyelids upon the last gleam of Thy light."

And Memoirs of a Wounded Man ends with these psalms, radiant with the oneness of God and the tormented man's yearning for His mercy. The most splendid thing in the book is this soul that looks out at you from the valley of pains and tears, of despair and calamity, proclaiming with the certainty of faith the belief in God, the Power from which all things came — and before which all the wonders and inventions and creations and productions that man's mind devises melt away.

And with these Cartesian analyses he spreads before us, as I have said, his understanding of the reality of man and life and the universe, in the garment of a Qurayshite tongue, an eloquent expression, and a marvelous humane literature whose author plucked his quill from his own ribs — those ribs which the surgeons' scalpels have shattered — and took his ink from his blood — that blood which flowed upon the scalpels' blades — all shaded by a creative thought, a wise mind, and a great soul of rare genius. Would that the sons of my country might read this book, that they might grasp the worth of the creative man, and respect for duty in whatever works they perform, and what value belongs to rebellious, emancipated literature, and what signal sacrifice this bedridden man of letters has made in printing every book he produces with whatever he could spare of the piaster he needs to buy his necessary medicine. And let them feel, if only once in the year, with their minds and not their bellies; and let those responsible learn what station literature holds in the land of radiance.