The Book of Khalid quotes

The most important in the history of nations and individuals was once the most trivial, and vice versa.

The plebeian, who is called today the man-in-the-street, can never see and understand the significance of the hidden seed of things, which in time must develop or die. A garter dropt in the ballroom of Royalty gives birth to an Order of Knighthood;

But it is a joy to stand on the bridge above the stream that flows between them, and listen to the muezzin in the minaret and the bulbuls in the Temple.

Mohammad calling to Venus, Venus calling to Mohammad⁠—what a romance!

We leave the subject to the poet that wants it. Another Laus Veneris to another Swinburne might suggest itself.

And the mules and donkeys, tottering under their heavy burdens, upsetting a tray of sweetmeats here, a counter of spices there, must share the narrow street with you and compel you to move along slowly, languidly like themselves.

They seem to take Time by the sleeve and say to it, “What’s your hurry?”

“These donkeys,” Shakib writes, quoting Khalid, “can teach the strenuous Europeans and hustling Americans a lesson.”

Here he trolled his favourite ditties beating the hoof behind his donkey.

For he preferred to be a donkey-boy than to be called a donkey at school.

The pedagogue with his drivel and discipline, he could not learn to love. The company of muleteers was much more to his liking. The open air was his school; and everything that riots and rejoices in the open air, he loved.

Indeed, I am as content, as comfortable here, as are their Excellencies in what is called the Salon. Surely, we are above them—at least, in the night. What matters it, then, if ours is called the Fourth Class and theirs the Primo.

Wherever one is happy, Shakib, there is the Primo.

’ ”

The evening of that very day, the trachoma-afflicted Syrian was absent from the ward. He was carried off by Iblis—the porter and a few Greenbacks assisting. Yes, even Shakib, who knew only a few English monosyllables, could here make himself understood.

For money is one of the two universal languages of the world, the other being love.

Indeed, money and love are as eloquent in Turkey and Dahomey as they are in Paris or New York.

The soul I tell you, still occupies the basement, even the sub-cellar. And an inundated cellar at that.

The soul, Shakib, is kept below, although the high places are vacant.

”

And these lusty Syrians could not repel the magnetic attraction of the polypiosis of what Shakib likens to the aliat (fattail) of our Asiatic sheep.

Surely, there be more devils under such an aliat than under the hat of a Jesuit.

And Khalid is the first to discover this. Both have been ensnared, however, and both, when in the snare, have been infernally inspired.

else he could not forget the peddling-box and the light-heeled, heavy-haunched women of Battery Park. Here are swings for the mind; toboggan-chutes for the soul; merry-go-rounds for the fancy; and many devious and alluring paths where one can lose himself for years.

A sanitarium this for the hebephreniac. And like all sanitariums, you go into it with one disease and come out of it with ten.

Had Shakib been forewarned of Khalid’s mind, had he even seen him at the gate before he entered, he would have given him a few hints about the cross-signs and barbed-cordons therein. But should he not have divined that Khalid soon or late was coming?

For which I respect them the more, and love them. Now, is it not absurd that I should come here and pay a hard dollar to hear this heretical speechifier insult my parents and my God?

Better the ring of al-Mutanabbi’s scimitars and spears than the clatter of these atheistical bones!

”

but for his own good I advised him to take up the peddling-box again. I reminded him of his saying once, ‘Peddling is a healthy and profitable business.’ ‘Come out,’ I insisted, ‘and though it be for the exercise.

Walking is the whetstone of thought.

’

“Indeed, Im-Hanna was right. Khalid had become too odd, too queer to be sane. Needless to say, I was not prone to follow his example at that time. Nor am I now. Mashallah!

Lacking the power and madness to set fire to the whole world, it were folly, indeed, to begin with one’s self.

I believe I had as much right to exaggerate in peddling as I had in writing verse. My license to heighten the facts holds good in either case. And to some extent, everyone, a poet be he or a cobbler, enjoys such a license.

O Success, our lords of power today are thy slaves, thy helots, our kings of wealth. Everyone grinds for thee, everyone for thee lives and dies. … Thy palaces of silver and gold are reared on the souls of men.

Thy throne is mortised with their bones, cemented with their blood.

Thou ravenous Gorgon, on what bankruptcies thou art fed, on what failures, on what sorrows! The railroads sweeping across the continents and the steamers ploughing through the seas, are laden with sacrifices to thee.

Like an ordinary pamphlet he would consign the Enchantress to the flames, and her scrapbooks and novels to boot. He does well, however, to return to his benevolent friend, the Medium. The spell can be counteracted by another, though less potent.

Ay, even witchcraft has its homeopathic remedies.

And the Medium, Shakib tells us, is delighted to welcome back her prodigal child. She opens to him her arms, and her heart; she slays the fatted calf. “I knew that Allah will bring you back to me,” she ejaculates; “my prevision is seldom wrong.”

Deficiencies in individuals, as in States, have their value and import.

Indeed, that sublime impulse of perfectibility, always vivacious, always working under various forms and with one underlying purpose, would be futile without them, and fatuous. And what were life without this incessant striving of the spirit?

… tear-bottles, not with purple, not with a written language, am I now concerned, but rather with what those in Purple and those who make this written language their capital, can bring within our reach of the treasures of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

I would fain find a land where the soul of man, and the heart of man, and the mind of man, are as the glass of my ancestors’ tear-bottles in their enduring quality and beauty.

My ancestors’ tear-bottles, and though buried in the earth ten thousand years, lose not a grain of their original purity and transparency, of their soft and iridescent colouring. But where is the natural colour and beauty of these human souls, buried in bunks under hatches?

And that star is either the last in the eternal darkness, or the first in the rising dawn.

It is either the first or the last star of night. And who shall say which it is?

Not the Church, surely, nor the State; not Science, nor Sociology, nor Philosophy, nor Religion. But the human will shall influence that star and make it yield its secret and its fire.

How can you eat, drink, walk, sleep, pray, worship, moralise, sentimentalise, or love, without them? Are you not ruffled and flounced when you first see the light, ruffled and flounced when you last see the darkness?

The cradle and the tomb, are they not the first and last ruffles of Man?

And between them what a panoramic display of flounces! What clean and attractive visible Edges of unclean invisible common Skirts! Look at your huge elaborate monuments, your fancy sepulchers, what are they but the ruffles of your triumphs and defeats?

For animals, too, have their tools, and man, in his visible flounces, has feathers enough to make even a peacock gape. Both my Philosophers have hit wide of the mark this time. And

Man, to my way of thinking, is a flounce-wearing Spirit.

Indeed, flounces alone, the invisible ones in particular, distinguish us from the beasts. For like ourselves they have their fashions in clothes; their peculiar speech; their own hidden means of intellection, and, to some extent, of imagination: but flounces they have not, they know not.

“Ay, we live in a phantasmagoric, cycloramic economy of flounces and ruffles. The human Spirit shirks nudity as it shirks pain. Even your modern preacher of the Simple Life is at best suggesting the moderate use of ruffles. …

Indeed, we can suffer anything, everything, but the naked and ugly reality.

Alas, have I not listened for years to what I mistook to be the strong, pure voice of the naked Truth?

“Ay, we live in a phantasmagoric, cycloramic economy of flounces and ruffles.

The human Spirit shirks nudity as it shirks pain.

Even your modern preacher of the Simple Life is at best suggesting the moderate use of ruffles. … Indeed, we can suffer anything, everything, but the naked and ugly reality.

Decidedly not, we reply. For how can we even keep company with Khalid, who has become such a maniac on flounces? And was this fantastic, phantasmagoric rhapsody all inspired by Najma’s simple remark on his hair?

Fruitful is thy word, O woman!

But being so far away now from the Hermitage in the Bronx, what has the “cherry in the cocktail” and “the olive in the oyster patty” to do with all this? Howbeit, the following deserves a place as the tail-flounce of his Fantasy.

And would they not often whisper unto each other, ‘Ah, Adam, ah, Eve!’ sighing likewise for sweeter things? And what about those fatal Apples, those two sour fruits of their Love?—

I tell thee every newborn babe is the magnificent flesh-flounce of a shivering, trembling, nudity.

And I Khalid, what am I but the visible ruffle of an invisible skirt? Verily, I am; and thou, too, my Brother. Yea, and this aquaterrestrial globe and these sidereal heavens are the divine flounces of the Vesture of Allah.”

And would they not often whisper unto each other, ‘Ah, Adam, ah, Eve!’ sighing likewise for sweeter things? And what about those fatal Apples, those two sour fruits of their Love?—I tell thee every newborn babe is the magnificent flesh-flounce of a shivering, trembling, nudity.

And I Khalid, what am I but the visible ruffle of an invisible skirt?

Verily, I am; and thou, too, my Brother. Yea, and this aquaterrestrial globe and these sidereal heavens are the divine flounces of the Vesture of Allah.”

“

And what is the use of binding, O Reverend Father, when a little sum of money can loosen anything you bind?

It seems to me that these prohibitions of the Church are only made for the purpose of collecting alms. In other words, you bind for the sake of loosening, when a good bait is on the hook, do you not?

But to think, when in love, were, indeed, disastrous. O Love, Love, what Camels of wisdom thou canst force to pass through the needle’s eye! What miracles divine are thine!

Khalid himself says that to be truly, deeply, piously in love, one must needs hate himself.

How true, how inexorably true!

“Know you not the anecdote about the enchanting Goddess Rabia, as related by Attar in his Biographies of Sufi Mystics and Saints? Here it is. Rabia was asked if she hated the devil, and she replied, ‘No.’ Asked again why, she said, ‘

Being absorbed in love, I have no time to hate.

’ Now, all the inhabitants of my terraces and fields seem to echo this sublime sentiment of their Goddess. The air and sunshine, nay, the very rocks are imbued with it.

For in the soul of the woodman is a song, I muse, as sweet as the rhythmic strains of the goldfinch, if it could be evoked. But the soul plodding up the hill under its heavy overshadowing burden, what breath has it left for song?

The man bowed beneath the load, the soul bowed beneath the man!

Alas, I seem to behold but moving burdens in my country. And yet, my swarthy and shrunken, but firm-fibred people plod along, content, patient, meek;

They remind me—no; they can not remind me of anything more imposing. But when I was visiting the great Mosques of Cairo I was reminded of them.

Yes, the pine forests are the great mosques of Nature.

And for art-lovers, what perennial beauty of an antique art is here. These majestic pillars arched with foliage, propping a light-green ceiling, from which cones hang in pairs and in clusters, and through which curiously shaped clouds can be seen moving in a cerulean sky;

“And why does not the Government interfere?” we ask.

“Because the Government,” replies our monk in a dry, droll air and gesture, “does not eat cheese.”

And the monks, we learned, do not have to buy it. For this, as well as their butter, olive oil, and wine, is made on their own estates, under their own supervision.

The Hermit is silent; for, as we have said, he is reluctant in making such confessions.

Virtue, once bragged about, once you pride yourself upon it, ceases to be such.

In his vineyard the Hermit is most thorough, even scientific. One would think that he believed only in work. No; he does not sprinkle the vines with holy water to keep the grubs away.

Ay, after the Larva dies, they pickle and preserve it in their chapel for the benefit of those who sought its oracles in life.

Let the beef-packers of America take notice; the monks of my country are in the market with ‘canned hermits!’

“And this Larva, be it remembered, is not subject to decay; a saint does not decompose in the flesh like mortal sinners.

The lighter grey of the horizon is mirrored in the clearer blue of the sea. But the darkness seems to gather on the breast of the sloping hills. Conquered on the heights, it retreats into the wadi.

Ay, the darkest hour is nearest the dawn.

“Now the light grey is become a lavender; the outlines of earth and sky are become more distinct; the mountain peaks, the dusky veil being rent, are separating themselves from the heaven’s embrace; the trees in the distance no longer seem like rain-clouds;

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;

“Everything in life must always resolve itself into love,” said Khalid, as he stood on the rock holding out his hand to his friend. “

Love is the divine solvent. Love is the splendour of God.

”

But on their way back to the Hotel, Khalid gives her this from Swedenborg: “ ‘Do you love me’ means ‘do you see the same truth that I see?’ ”

There is no use. Khalid is impossible.

Man is of Eternity, not of Time; and love, the highest attribute of man, must be likewise. With me it must endure throughout all worlds and immensities; else I would not raise a finger for it.

Pleasure, Shakib, is for the child within us; sexual joy, for the animal; love, for the god.

That is why I say when you set your seal to the contract, be sure it is of the kind which all the gods of all the future worlds will raise to their lips in reverence.”

No; the Arab will never be virtually conquered. Nominally, maybe. And I doubt if any of the European Powers can do it. Why? Chiefly because Arabia has a Prophet. She produced one and she will produce more.

Cannons can destroy Empires; but only the living voice, the inspired voice can build them.

”