Ameen Rihani

“ For what proof have we, it is often asked nowadays, of the existence of the soul and of the necessity, in consequence, of a soul-ideal? I go neither to metaphysics nor to spiritualism for an answer. To those who deny its existence, who make light of the innate divine flame in man, who can not see anything outside of matter, or anything but matter in matter, to these materialists I offer the perfume of the rose, the light of the sun, the emanation of a firefly, the aura of a planet, to say nothing of the human understanding. ”

“ To be sure, wherever there are streams of opalescent water, human life is imperishable, immortal. But sleep is often mistaken for death; and the apoplexy of a nation is of longer duration than that of an individual. Under the magic wand of modern industrialism, therefore, Babylon and Nineveh might rise again and put Paris and New York to shame. No; they might rise and help to bring the better mind of Europe nearer to the East and the purer soul of India nearer to the West : they might become the connecting link between the Orient and the Occident of the future. ”

“ No Labor Union can guide him; no Government can deter him. He is a fatality. Spiritually deformed himself, he comes, paradoxical as it may seem, to restore the world to its spiritual ideals. The religion that was given him as a consolation, he rejects; the faith that was perverted to keep him in bondage, to reconcile him to his gilded fetters, he renounces forever. But he will swing back with his masters from the height of a bloody crisis to the highest ideal—to a spirituality that is the common heritage and the cherished treasure of the rich and the poor. ”

“ For though the mosque be in the tinkers' bazaar seldom a sound from the outer world reaches even its court or violates its hallowed silence. And in this vastness of spiritual repose the soul may loaf and invite the body, and the mind may doze and invite the soul. Without cymbals and bells, without organ and choir, without icons and statues, but with the lamps of faith and devotion ever burning, the soul is left to itself to find its way through an infinity of unworldly calm and silence to the divine infinities of the One Supreme—Allah. ”

“ Some people among us will find these between the curse and the blessing. I, for one, refuse to peep with the radical reformer into the boudoir of the Trust; and I admire her not, as do the aladinists of Damascus, in her travelling toggery. But in her workaday clothes I behold her walking with the people, and I dare say she is tolerably human.
For in spite of what is set down in the Criminal Code, I am convinced that the Trust hath a soul. Else how could she be so fair and so wicked, so voracious withal and so bounteous? Indeed, the soul of the Trust is accumulative, even like her capital. ”

“ Like the Ujigami of Japan, we all have our distinct deities, which we invest with our own personality. In this sense, we are all self-worshippers: the gods of our allegiance, our devotion, are the gods of our pride. Else why should we be so attached to the soil, the plants, the flowers, the cliffs of our native land? There is something even in a familiar fern that leaves in the soul the impress of its own locality.
In my own country the flowers are the toys of our childhood; they are nature's precious presents, which she never fails to bring us on every holiday. ”

“ The machine there is fast replacing the dexterous hands of the artisan; the atelier is being transformed into a factory; the merchant is usurping the place of the man of talent; the quaint bazaar is becoming a market-place of brummagem; the mould is destroying the spirit of invention; and uniformity will ultimately banish the creative genius of the race. It would be a pity, a calamity, indeed, if the soul of the Oriental, which he puts into his work, were to be destroyed by the hustling, strenuous, money-making spirit of the present day West. ”

“ OF CHURCH AND MOSQUE
OF all the places of worship I know,—and I have lugged my unshrived soul and my weary limbs into many a foreign temple,—the mosque has always impressed me as being by far the most democratic and the most unstinted in its varied hospitalities. There is nothing in it or in its economy to flatter the rich, or oft end the poor, to repel the weary, or distract the devout. The welcome it extends is not of the two-by-two pew order; the solace it affords is no bread-and-cheese affair. ”

“ The human touch is unfailing no matter how slight or how strong. It can hold you spellbound before a fern or send you scampering through the fields, chasing a butterfly or a will-o'-the-wisp. For Nature, like man, will tyrannize when she can. And when the translator is conquered by her, he loses the quality that makes his art supreme. He becomes a dryasdust master of definitions and classifications. For to be impersonal as the elements, is unhuman, unnatural. One may be sublime, as Emerson; but it is an arid sublimity void of the one great element of genius—passion.
To copy Nature? ”

“ For we all find some one below us or above us—in most cases below and above us—to afford us a satisfaction and an incentive—to make the arduous ascent a pleasant jaunt. If the working man and the labor leader, the capitalist and the politician all recognized this truth and espoused the ideal it connotes, the social and industrial problems of the times would not seem so hopelessly insoluble, without general strikes and revolutions. For legislation alone is, after all, only a form of compulsion. And a man without a spiritual ideal will obey the law when he can't help it and break it when he can. ”

“ The terebinth and the nenuphar of your valleys—Thoreau. The flowering furze-bush on your hilltips, with a smooth and mighty boulder for its throne—Emerson. The acrid elecampane in your fields, on your waysides, in your vineyards—Whitman.
And if the symbol does not fit the subject, or the subject is not at ease in the symbol, the fault is not mine; for my American walking shoes are new, and my Oriental eyes are old. But those who slip on the way, believe me, often see deeper than those who do not. ”

“ The birds in their migrations follow their leader. Even the bees, even the ants—but the proverbial wisdom of the ages is as futile as the warning of Nature. My poor, proud, distressed and distracted little race, now in its autumn days—will it survive the approaching storms of the coming winter? Will it ever regain the glory of its ancient springs? Will its children, who are still pagans at heart, ever realize again the beauty of art in Nature and the power of Nature in art? ”

“ For if we can not see a picture in a fine piece of music or hear the strains of a distant song in a picture,—if we can not drink of the beauty of both with the eye as well as the ear,—we had better seek entertainment in a picture gallery, where hang many a visible palpable specimen of colors rioting in quadrangles of gilded mouldings, of colors clamoring for recognition in the little square horizons of the artist's soul. ”

“ What were life without that potentiality of mystery that holds out to us, across the glamors of the mirage and the dusky opacities of reality, when we awaken from the somnambulism of self-consciousness, the nectar of love and assurance and peace.
But we boast nowadays of being free and untramelled; we glory in the right to pursue the light within us, which, under the exigencies of a highly evolutionized society, seldom leads us outside of Self. ”

“ And when all the bushes and herbs of the Lebanon coppices and fields are glorying in their fragrance and beauty, the elecampane waves its mucilaginous and wilted branches in perfect self-satisfaction. But when Nature withholds her favors from the wild daughters of Spring, the flowering of the elecampane begins in good earnest. Ay, the life beautiful is not denied even this bold and ungainly plant, which is ubiquitous in these hills. ”

“ But a reverence for the Unknown, an open mind, a sense of awe before the Unknowable, a quickening hope, an implicit faith in its potentialities,—these will accomplish the miracle that Marx and Mendel and Darwin have only partly discovered and described. For the laborer without a spirituality, without a developed sense for the beautiful and the true,—the laborer, or the capitalist for that matter, without intellectual and spiritual needs, is a slave, and the son of a slave, and the parent of a slave, even though he become the chief of all the Soviets of Russia. ”

“ To drop the metaphor, the truth, which rests on the eternal verities of existence, will always prevail. Like the seasons of the year, like history, truth also repeats itself. But we seldom recognize it, when great poets or true artists—the prophets and the priests of our day—present it to us in garments spick and span, following the fashion of the age, the slant of its fancy, the turn and temper of its mind. ”

“ Sanneen, rising in the East over a dozen peaks slurred together, we behold Winter shrouded in snow; in the tiger-spotted escarpments, in the grey cliffs, barren and amorphous, forming a huge wall to the deep gorge in which the river flows, we have a fitting monument to Autumn; while in the lowlands facing the Mediterranean, the orange orchards and the olive groves are beautiful monuments to Summer and Spring, wrapped in the light green of the fields and buried in the warm brown soil of life perennial. Indeed, my native horizon is a cyclorama of all the seasons. ”

“ The same thing might be said of a poem in which all the reactions of Nature are translated through the complex medium of the senses as well as the soul. Her voice, her form, her lights and shades, the very spirit of her whole being breathes and sings in the lines of a Wordsworth or a Shelly. At this height, the painter and the poet are one; or the musician brings them together, is the link between them. For a poem may not only contain a picture, or a picture, a poem, but both are often vibrant with the rythmic harmony, even the melody of song. ”

“ GREEN LOGS AND BRUSHWOOD
OUR ideals are the vehicles of our illusions; our illusions are the motor forces of our desires; our desires are born of an innate, insatiable longing for the Beautiful, the Good, and the True,—for the superlatives, in other words, of what, according to our own light, is the truth; and our own light, that undying spiritual flame in the temple of our being, has its eternal sources in the sun and soil, as in the schools and universities, and the arts and sciences of our time. ”

“ And this desire, though it be only partly realized in a lifetime, is the heritage of the ideal, which he bequeaths to them.
But the world seldom recognizes the spirituality in the material ideals of the poor. They are ridiculed by those who preach, but do not practice, the higher ethics. They are flouted, called base, worldly, sordid, by those professional idealists of religion and literature and art. And yet, a loaf of bread can regenerate a soul; a loaf of bread can precipitate a revolution. ”

“ Everything a child touches in his holy years lives afterward in the pious memory a life of its own and is subject, like the flowers, to the vicissitudes of the seasons. It grows, it blooms, it withers; and withering, it spreads of its petals a rug under the feet of remeniscence. It paints the horizon of the soul a sullen gold,—it fills its resting places with an entrancing perfume. The child-soul is a nursery which afterward often becomes a deserted garden in which we love to stroll. ”

“ Nature is against it; super-nature, or the supreme source of the light within us, frowns upon it. I am a part of the All, but I am free. And my freedom ends necessarily where the freedom of the All, whether God or the State, begins. ”

“ But can it be realized wholly by a revolt only against a hierarchy or a state? It depends upon the nature and scope of the revolt. If we are concerned in breaking the fetters that are fastened upon our bodies and souls by external agencies only, we are doomed to failure. But if we become aware of the fetters, which we, in the sub-consciousness of centuries of submission, have fastened upon the spirit within us and strive to free ourselves of them first, then we are certain to triumph.
For freedom of the spirit is the cornerstone of all freedom. ”

“ Every human action, collective or otherwise, has in it the possibility of a creative or a destructive force. We stop in our work, but we do not know, we can not know, where our work really ends. It may never end, for that matter.
Through the scintellating candor of follies, the mirage of illusions, the unlighted labyrinths of realities, it goes on, with us or without us, perpetuating itself and its fruition. True, we are often lifted by it to cold barren heights, or led into a chamber of horrors. ”