Readers' Mail

From Miss Rose Ghorayeb we received the following word:

I read with interest the talk of the artist Howayek about the memorial he intends to make for his friend and companion of immortal memory.

And I set about contemplating the design as he presented it in the pages of "The Woman's Voice," asking myself what meanings it carries. It seemed to me that its author meant by it to make Gibran's works known, by displaying their titles to those who do not know them, to bring out samples of his drawings, and to fix his portrait amid the names and the drawings, as though saying to the beholders:

Those are our works — they point to us...

But Gibran's fame is warrant enough to make him known to far and near. And in the catalogues of the public and private libraries there is that which dispenses with the carving of the names of his books upon stone. I would have wished the stone monument to hold a design inspired by the style of Lebanese building, with its slanting lines and its Eastern stamp, and that in what is engraved upon the stone there be an imagination pointing to Gibran's art and his creations.

Gibran lived his short life in an enchanted world peopled by the brides of the meadows, the processions of the gods, and the spirits of the prophets. And it is fitting for one whose drawings and writings teemed with symbols and imaginings that there should appear, in the memorial raised to him, meanings to be discerned from behind the lines, and signs through which his creative genius and his fertile imagination shine.

Nor is it difficult for the hand that drew Gibran's famous oil portrait to carve in stone his likeness in an inspired posture, harmonizing with the frame of the cedars and the mountains he loved, and drawing inspiration from the temples of Afqa and the Baalbek that he sang.