Selections from the Literature of “May”

May says, on the anniversary of the birth of the Arab Prophet, under the title “Conqueror of Hearts”:

“Many hosts of sand stir restlessly, little by little, host after host, and talk in the last hours of the dark before dawn.

“Do you not see the dawn glittering resplendent on the horizon? A fine dust of light scatters around me, like a powder of gold and crystal. This is a feast day.

“But for this day, and what set it apart among days, there would never have been those many caravans — the pilgrims' caravans we have seen for centuries upon centuries, going and returning. Those caravans have multiplied by thousands and thousands of thousands for fourteen centuries, and the purpose of their journeying changed from the moment the great host of victory burst forth from the innermost heart of the desert: they became caravans of remembrance, worship, and peace, coming toward us in a rosy dust-cloud from the farthest distances — where the horizons themselves seem to move — and leaving us in a rosy dust-cloud, to vanish behind the horizons that bend tenderly over their unique and precious trust.

“I know that trust, for the spring once led me to it. There is the resting place of him who knew how to cast into the souls of peoples a living, immortal spirit — the youth of the desert whom his Lord chose to bear the Book; he forsook his home, and his weapon was a book, and with it he conquered all the worlds. He did not merely conquer lands and countries and have done — he conquered hearts by his secret and opened souls by his magic. Lord of raiders and conquerors, he is our youth, the youth of the burning sands, the youth of the dunes. He came with the miracle of miracles: he brought forth fertility, fertility, from the abodes of drought and barrenness.

“We the sands — our existence was not in vain, as we supposed through our long and painful term.. We the inert were the source of movement and of life. We the barren were, and still are, the road of the fruitful migration.”

And May says, in a letter she sent to Gibran in 1924, which is a marvel of the modern literature of correspondence: “I shall come to you many, many times during these seasons, and stay under your protection, seeking the delight of your presence. Do you promise to free yourself from your occupations and diversions, if only for minutes, to receive me, and to consecrate to me alone moments in which you strip yourself of everyone and everything?.. I shall remember you especially on your birthday, and watch over you with an ethereal care the whole day long, and so live with you the life that contents me — in the purest of the thoughts that come to me, the most joyous of the sights and perceptions my senses receive, the noblest of the inclinations that contend within me, and in the warmest and simplest of the prayers I recite. And in the morning I shall cast upon you the first greetings, and ask of you the first of your smiles.”

And May speaks at length of the merit of letters, saying, in sum:

“Peoples, like individuals, understand one another only through intellectual concord, and are made one only by spiritual mingling.

“The goods of factories and the products of workshops forever keep the stamp of the people that invented or worked them. But the people of thought and genius are cast in no mold and bear no stamp; they represent humanity entire, and they serve all, without limit or exception. They speak and they write, and whether they voice their views and their feelings in Greek or Latin, Arabic or Hindi, they are but interpreting human needs and human desires massed within their great, sensitive souls. Geniuses are only individuals whom life has chosen to comprehend the milieu they live in and to reach its utmost desires and its most pressing tendencies; they are thereby nearer than others to the depths of the human spirit, quicker to grasp its movements and its traits, and more skillful in expressing them. Their whole importance rests upon their firm connection with the universal, ever-creating mind; it is as though humanity's great heart beat, time after time, in their small hearts, so that the echo of its beats goes on reverberating in the scratching of their pens.”

And here is one of her sweet breaths, released in pain and in questioning:

“And here I am, walking at the edges of life's dance-floor, suffering what all the prisoners of existence suffer. The longing for happiness torments me as it torments them, and like them I receive that ever-renewed intimation of its existence: at every step, disappointment and grief; at every step, hope and gladness; at every step, awe before this vital torrent that pours foaming and frothing toward it knows not where; at every step, a question without answer about the meaning of life and its aim, about the meaning of pain and its aim, about the meaning of joy and its aim; and at every step, a question put to the universe: why was the human soul created like hollow brass, returning to every sound an echo — ringing, deep, and aching?”