The Book of Khalid - Ameen Fares Rihani (good books for high schoolers txt) 📗

To graft the strenuosity of Europe and America upon the ease of the Orient, the materialism of the West upon the spirituality of the East,––this to us seems to be the principal aim of Khalid. But often in his wanderings and divagations of thought does he give us fresh proof of the truism that no two opposing elements meet and fuse without both losing their original identity. You may place the bit of contentment in the mouth of ambition, so to speak, and jog along in your sterile course between the vast wheat fields groaning under the thousand-toothed plough and the gardens of delight swooning with devotion and sensuality. But cross ambition with contentment and you get the hinny of indifference or the monster of fatalism. We do not say that indifference at certain passes of life, and certain stages, is not healthy, and fatalism not powerful; but both we believe are factors as potent in commerce and trade as pertinacity and calculation. “But is there not room in the garden of delight for a wheat field?” asks Khalid. “Can we not apply the bow to the telegraph wires of the world and make them the vehicle of music as of stock quotations? Can we not simplify life as we are simplifying the machinery of industry? Can we 240 not consecrate its Temple to the Trinity of Devotion, Art, and Work, or Religion, Romance, and Trade?”

This seems to be the gist of Khalid’s gospel. This, through the labyrinths of doubt and contradiction, is the pinnacle of faith he would reach. And often in this labyrinthic gloom, where a gleam of light from some recess of thought or fancy reveals here a Hermit in his cloister, there an Artist in his studio, below a Nawab in his orgies, above a Broker on the Stock Exchange, we have paused to ask a question about these glaring contrarieties in his life and thought. And always would he make this reply: “I have frequently moved and removed between extremes; I have often worked and slept in opposing camps. So, do not expect from me anything like the consistency with which the majority of mankind solder and shape their life. Deep thought seems often, if not always, inconsistent at the first blush. The intensity and passiveness of the spirit are as natural in their attraction and repulsion as the elements, whose harmony is only patent on the surface. Consistency is superficial, narrow, one-sided. I am both ambitious, therefore, and contented. My ambition is that of the earth, the ever producing and resuscitating earth, doing the will of God, combatting the rasure of time; and my contentment is that of the majestic pines, faring alike in shade and sunshine, in calm and storm, in winter as in spring. Ambition and Contentment are the night and day of my life-journey. The day makes room for the fruits of solacement which the night brings; 241 and the night gives a cup of the cordial of contentment to make good the promise of day to day.

“Ay, while sweating in the tortuous path, I never cease to cherish the feeling in which I was nourished; the West for me means ambition, the East, contentment: my heart is ever in the one, my soul, in the other. And I care not for the freedom which does not free both; I seek not the welfare of the one without the other. But unlike my Phœnician ancestors, the spiritual with me shall not be limited by the natural; it shall go far above it, beyond or below it, saturating, sustaining, purifying what in external nature is but a symbol of the invisible. Nor is my idea of the spiritual developed in opposition to nature, and in a manner inimical to its laws and claims, as in Judaism and Christianity.

“The spiritual and natural are so united, so inextricably entwined around each other, that I can not conceive of them separately, independently. And both in the abstract sense are purportless and ineffectual without Consciousness. They are blind, dumb forces, beautiful, barbaric pageants, careering without aim or design through the immensities of No-where and No-time, if they are not impregnated and nourished with Thought, that is to say, with Consciousness, vitalised and purified. You may impregnate them with philosophy, nourish them with art; they both emanate from them, and remain as skidding clouds, as shining mirages, as wandering dust, until they find their exponent in Man.

“I tell thee then that Man, that is to say Consciousness, 242 vitalised and purified, in other words Thought––that alone is real and eternal. And Man is supreme, only when he is the proper exponent of Nature, and spirit, and God: the three divine sources from which he issues, in which he is sustained, and to which he must return. Nature and the spiritual, without this embodied intelligence, this somatic being, called man or angel or ape, are as ermine on a wax figure. The human factor, the exponent intelligence, the intellective and sensuous faculties, these, my Brothers, are whole, sublime, holy, only when, in a state of continuous expansion, the harmony among themselves and the affirmative ties between them and Nature, are perfect and pure. No, the spiritual ought not and can not be free from the sensuous, even the sensual. The true life, the full life, the life, pure, robust, sublime, is that in which all the nobler and higher aspirations of the soul AND THE BODY are given free and unlimited scope, with the view of developing the divine strain in Man, and realising to some extent the romantic as well as the material hopes of the race. God, Nature, Spirit, Passion––Passion, Spirit, Nature, God––in some such panorama would I paint the life of a highly developed being. Any of these elements lacking, and the life is wanting, defective, impure.

“I have no faith in men who were conceived in a perfunctory manner, on a pragmatical system, so to speak; the wife receiving her husband in bed as she would a tedious guest at an afternoon tea. Only two flames uniting produce a third; but a flame and a 243 name, or a flame and a spunge, produce a hiff and nothing. Oh, that the children of the race are all born phœnix-like in the fire of noble and sacred passion, in the purgatory, as it were, of Love. What a race, what a race we should have. What men, what women! Yes, that is how the children of the earth should be conceived, not on a pragmatical system, in an I-don’t-care-about-the-issue manner. I believe in evoking the spirit, in dreaming a little about the gods of Olympus, and a little, too, about the gods of the abysmal depths, before the bodily communion. And in earnest, O my Brother, let us do this, despite what old Socrates says about the propriety and wisdom of approaching your wife with prudence and gravity....”

And thus, if we did not often halloo, Khalid, like a huntsman pursuing his game, would lose himself in the pathless, lugubrious damp of the forest. If we did not prevent him at times, holding firmly to his coat-tail, he would desperately pursue the ghost of his thoughts even on such precipitous paths to those very depths in which Socrates and Montaigne always felt at home. But he, a feverish, clamorous, obstreperous stripling of a Beduin, what chance has he in extricating his barbaric instincts from such thorny hedges of philosophy? And had he not quoted Socrates in that last paragraph, it would have been expunged. No, we are not utterly lost to the fine sense of propriety of this chaste and demure age. But no matter how etiolated and sickly the thought, it regains its colour and health when it breathes the literary air. 244 Prudery can not but relish the tang of lubricity when flavoured with the classical. Moreover, if Socrates and Montaigne speak freely of these midnight matters, why not Khalid, if he has anything new to say, any good advice to offer. But how good and how new are his views let the Reader judge.

’Tis very well to speak “of evoking the spirit before the bodily communion,” but those who can boast of a deeper experience in such matters will find in Socrates’