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A review by savaging
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
2.0
I will file this in my books-I-will-surely-use-for-therapeutic-value-but-don't-actually-believe category. Which is not a small stack. All these hopeful, open-minded prophets and new age religions promising order to the cosmos. Urging bravery and creativity. Verily the heart within me burns.
And verily she burns out when I realize that this cosmology requires that I assume all suffering is accounted for in some best-of-all-possible-worlds balance sheet -- that each victim asked for it in the cosmological long-view, that the suffering anyway is an illusion, settle down, dear.
Gibran writes with the operatic, universalizing tone of William Blake and Nietzsche's Zarathustra, but without the hard-bit edge of these other two. All the same, they're all fantasizing a booming oz-wizard before the awestruck audience. Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain, who might be blind as the rest of us.
And verily she burns out when I realize that this cosmology requires that I assume all suffering is accounted for in some best-of-all-possible-worlds balance sheet -- that each victim asked for it in the cosmological long-view, that the suffering anyway is an illusion, settle down, dear.
Gibran writes with the operatic, universalizing tone of William Blake and Nietzsche's Zarathustra, but without the hard-bit edge of these other two. All the same, they're all fantasizing a booming oz-wizard before the awestruck audience. Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain, who might be blind as the rest of us.