BBC article demands to know why popular crappy mumbo-jumbo isn’t a rave with the critics
The article quotes some short excerpts from “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran:
On marriage: “Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.”
On children: ”Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”
On beauty: ”Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.”
The article asks:
Kahlil Gibran is said to be one of the world’s bestselling poets, and his life has inspired a play touring the UK and the Middle East. But many critics have been lukewarm about his merits. Why, then, has his seminal work, The Prophet, struck such a chord with generations of readers?
Well, perhaps for the same reason Paul Coelho did; he saw that there was a market for narcissistic sentimental mystical bullshit and knew how to exploit it.
Despite the immense popularity of his writing, or perhaps because of it, The Prophet was panned by many critics in the West who thought it simplistic, naive and lacking in substance.
But no - it’s because of them elites with their ivory-tower ‘standards’!
“There is no doubt he deserves a place in the Western canon. It is strange to teach English literature and ignore a literary phenomenon.”
Professor Cole must also find it strange that The Louvre isn’t stuffed to the rafters with Thomas Kincaid paintings.
Full article:
