Gibran Academy of Arts | www.gibran-academy.com | Kahlil Gibran society of friends around the world
Dear Miss Ziedeh, Peace be with your good and beautiful spirit. Today I received the issues of al-Muqtattaf which you so kindly sent me, and I read your articles one after the other with great pleasure and immense admiration. I found in your articles a host of those tendencies and inclinations which for so long have surrounded my thought and followed my dreams; however there were also other theories and principles which i wish we could have discussed face to face. For if I were now in Cairo I would have begged you to permit me to visit you and discuss in detail [subjects such as] "the spirit of places, "mind and heart" and some aspects of Henri Bergson. But Cairo is in the distant East and New York far away in the West, and there is no way we can have the discussion I hoped and wished for. Your articles show you to be supremely talented, well-read, and possessed of a refined taste in the selection and choice of your material, and in its organization. They also clearly reflect your personal and private experiences, making your researches the best of their kind in the Arabic language, for I consider experience and personal conviction superior to all kinds of knowledge and all kinds of work. However, I have a question which I hope you will let me ask you. The question is this: Might not the day perhaps come when your great talents would henceforth be dedicated to expressing the secrets of your inner Self, the particular experiences and the noble mysteries of that Self ? Don’t you see that the creation of poetry or prose is better than a thesis on poets and poetry ? As one of your admirers, I would rather read a poem of yours on the smile of the Sphinx, for example, than read an article by you on the history of Egyptian art and its development from age to age or from dynasty to dynasty. This is because by writing a poem on the smile of the Sphinx you offer me something personal, whereas by writing a thesis on the history of Egyptian art you direct me to the general and purely intellectual.
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