This opening statement of the chapter On Children is among the most frequently quoted lines in The Prophet, and it establishes the book's preoccupation with the autonomy of the individual within a larger cosmic process. Suheil Bushrui, whose studies of Gibran's life and writings are among the most cited in English, reads the line as a reformulation of a theme that runs through Gibran's Arabic prose: that the self belongs to a force greater than family or nation. Mikhail Naimy, Gibran's close friend and biographer, recounts how the writer's own family history, marked by poverty, emigration, and the loss of a sister and brother, shaped his suspicion of possessive attachment. Virginia Hilu's collection of Gibran's letters, Beloved Prophet (1972), shows how he returned repeatedly to questions of parental love and release in his correspondence with his mother and with Mary Haskell. The line is thus less a sentiment about children than an argument about how love should be practised. Read in the context of Gibran's wider mysticism, the passage presents parenthood as a stewardship of something that does not belong to the parent. Its wording is secure, since it appears in the original English text of 1923.
Commentary
This opening statement of the chapter On Children is among the most frequently quoted lines in The Prophet, and it establishes the book's preoccupation with the autonomy of the individual within a larger cosmic process. Suheil Bushrui, whose studies of Gibran's life and writings are among the most cited in English, reads the line as a reformulation of a theme that runs through Gibran's Arabic prose: that the self belongs to a force greater than family or nation. Mikhail Naimy, Gibran's close friend and biographer, recounts how the writer's own family history, marked by poverty, emigration, and the loss of a sister and brother, shaped his suspicion of possessive attachment. Virginia Hilu's collection of Gibran's letters, Beloved Prophet (1972), shows how he returned repeatedly to questions of parental love and release in his correspondence with his mother and with Mary Haskell. The line is thus less a sentiment about children than an argument about how love should be practised. Read in the context of Gibran's wider mysticism, the passage presents parenthood as a stewardship of something that does not belong to the parent. Its wording is secure, since it appears in the original English text of 1923.