The Woman's Word

It happens from time to time that a great person passes through Lebanon; the newspapers print the name in bold letters, and tongues pass along his sayings openly and with admiration... And sometimes this great person is a woman, and then she receives many times more of this talk than men do — as happened last month with the visit of India's delegate to the United Nations and sister of the house of Nehru, Mrs. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.

The result of Mrs. Pandit's visit was that she left in the souls of the Lebanese, and especially of Lebanese women, various impressions not free of contradictions. Some said she was the most brilliant orator they had ever heard; some committed her sayings to memory; and another group was vexed by certain of her expressions and took them amiss... Glory be to Him who can please everyone!

People saw her with one eye and I saw her with another; they heard her with one ear and I heard her with another... They saw a woman slight of body, inclined to asceticism in the things of this world; and I saw a woman who had risen above human weakness and man's drift after material things, and had attained the pure essence.

People heard her call for spreading the principles of human justice and of peace in the world; and I heard her give... a marvelous lesson in "simplicity!" How magnificent her person — she makes of it, of that very self, the highest example for this lesson, without pointing with a single word to what she intends!

We remember well, no doubt, her outward appearance — and she too, no doubt, remembers how we appeared: dolls and peacocks. In my mind there remains a fixed image of two black eyes regarding, with utmost astonishment, the furs and jewels and silks upon our women!

People heard her speak of her broad experience and direct them toward what is good for their homelands; and I heard her... and behold, the center of gravity in her is that reassuring depth that suffuses her eyes: she has arrived, after long struggle, at the shore of peace, at absolute truth, at the depths of knowledge; and it became clear to her that everything worldly soon passes away, and that a person's worth lies in the services he renders to his fellow man and to his homeland. Everything besides is vanity...

And truly it is a wonder, after we have seen her and heard her, how we go on wading in the water at the shore, clinging to the husks and not the kernel, hanging our greatest concern on what we shall wear and what we shall eat?

Strange, how our souls remain burdened, groaning under the yoke of hollow materialism, which tyrannizes over us utterly and conscripts us... as abject slaves to its greeds and its reckless whims!

And truly I do not know — since we stand at the opening of this new era, the era of freedom and equality — why we, the women of this country, do not take the lesson to heart and make of Mrs. Pandit a living example to be followed, in humble, constructive greatness?

Why do we not rise above our passion for and attachment to glittering appearances, and make absolute "simplicity," and it alone, the fur for our bodies, the earrings for our ears, the necklaces for our necks... and a keen sword with which to fall upon the "materialism" of this age, which is driving us to ruin?!