Wow. I have never read/heard of that one. I used Gibran as a template to bring up my children, and it may well have been the key to my behaviour when my son tried to kill himself. I will never know that for sure, but I am most happy to read the post, and expect to come back to read it often. I cannot use protonmail...not sure what I did to that account...duh...Tunnel vision makes life extremely interesting. Especially on the computer...smile.
My father's maternal grandparents immigrated from Al-Mishtaya (or as the street sign says in English, "Mishtayeh") in 1907 at a time when greater Syria enclose modern Israel, Palestine and Lebanon. Gibran resonated strongly with the first generation of that side of my family which was born in the United States, as the modern Lebanese border is closer to Al-Mishtaya (within walking distance) than my ancestral village is to the Mediterranean coast.
Some younger American born children of Syrian immigrants only bought Gibran's books for his sketches instead of actually reading what he wrote, or considering how it applied to themselves.
In the narcissistic minds of many Christian Syrian-Lebanese Americans I grew up around, their children are themselves, applying the rationale that they made their children, and often naming their children after themselves or other family members, stripping those children of their own independent identities. (I believe that it should be illegal for parents to name children after themselves, as children have a right to their own identities. My evil and abusive self hating father poisoned me with his name in a last moment change when I was born, a massive factor in destroying my life.)
Being permitted to exist and succeed or fail on my own merits was never an option. The most revealing thing my evil and stupid homicidal father ever said to me was, "I criticize you for faults I saw in myself when I was your age." In reality, I am nothing like my father, and never was, but in his own brain diseased mind, I am a reproduction of him.
"Your children are
NOT you!" is what Gibran was howling, but stupid old men were only buying his books for the pictures, not reading how Gibran was saying, "Fuck tradition, Fuck the old ways, this is the 20th Century, get on with it!!!"
Deciding at age nine to never have a girlfriend, never get married and never have children was the best decision I ever made, as I slammed the door shut on advancing to another generation the self hating abuse my psychopathic elementary school principal father heaped on me with massive school psychologist support. (My father and almost my entire elementary and high school faculties should have gone to jail for what they did and allowed to be done to me. Schools have no right to exist anywhere.) If my parents had actually READ what Gibran had written in The Prophet before I was born, I would have never been named after my father (and wasn't supposed to be), and I might be happy and successful in life today like my younger twin brothers who were permitted their own identities.
Well, I am here at Sanctioned Suicide instead, researching and planning on doing for myself what was not ever done on my behalf in my entire life, the non disputably RIGHT thing, self administered euthanasia. I have the power to erase my name, and eradicate the allegation that I ever had that name by eradicating myself. (Jumping into a vat of molten metal at some steel mill might be ideal, as that could eradicate all physical traces of my mortal body and brain, Seeing that clip of another doing exactly that was inspirational. No "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," only "Flesh to steam" for a forever unknown person with not even a trace of DNA to examine.)