The Prophet

A prophet prepares to leave the city that has been his home for twelve years. Before he departs, the people of Orphalese gather to ask him the questions that have always burned in their hearts: What of love? What of marriage and children? What of work, of freedom, of sorrow, of death? What of the self and its knowing? In twenty-eight crystalline chapters, he answers them all, and in doing so, he answers something in you. Gibran wrote The Prophet during his final years, dying of tuberculosis at forty-eight, and the book carries the weight of a man who knew he was leaving behind not answers but mirrors. The prose is spare and enormous at once, each sentence a vessel big enough to hold both joy and grief. This is not a book you read so much as return to, during heartbreaks and celebrations, at weddings and gravesides, at twenty and sixty. It asks nothing of you but attention, and in exchange offers something rarer: the feeling that your most private struggles have been given voice by someone who understood them all along.