The Prophet

Almustafa has waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for a ship to carry him home. On the seventh day of the month of reaping, he climbs a hill outside the walls and sees it coming in with the mist. The gates of his heart, Gibran writes, are flung open.

Then he walks back down, and before he reaches the bottom a sadness comes over him.

That is how the book begins: not with a teaching, but with a man who finally gets the thing he has wanted for twelve years and finds that it hurts. Everything he says afterwards is said from inside that double feeling. The joy and the ache arrive together, and the book never pretends you can have the first without the second.

What makes leaving hard is not what you would expect. He does not only grieve the good years. He thinks of the long days of pain and the long nights of loneliness he spent inside those walls, and asks: “who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?”

Then comes the image the whole chapter turns on: “It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.”

A garment is something you put on over yourself and can hang up again. A skin is you. Twelve years of a place, the lonely nights included, have become a skin, not a garment. So he cannot leave cleanly. Anyone who has moved away from a city where they were unhappy, and been surprised to cry at the station, knows exactly what he means.

When Almustafa says he is tearing off “a skin” rather than casting off “a garment”, what is he saying about his years in the city?

• He must strip off every attachment before he is fit to sail
• Only the happy years in the city are worth grieving as he goes
• The city, pain and loneliness included, has become part of him✓Correct answer
• The city was a disguise he wore, and leaving lets him be himself

A garment comes off without damage; a skin does not. He has just said he will regret leaving even his pain and his aloneness, so it is the whole twelve years, not only the good part, that has grown into him.

And still he will not stay. His reason is one of the hardest lines in the book: “For to stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould.”

Notice what he is not saying. He is not saying Orphalese was bad, or that he has outgrown it. He is saying that staying because the place is warm and familiar would turn something living into a fixed shape: warmth hardening into a mould.

Then two pictures of what going costs. A voice “cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings”; it has to travel on alone. And the eagle crosses the sun “without his nest”. What he made here has to be left here, or he cannot go at all.

At the foot of the hill he sees the sailors on the prow, men of his own land, and speaks to them as if they were old friends: “How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream.”

It is an odd reversal. Usually waking is the real thing and dreams are the copy. For Almustafa waking life is itself a dream, only a deeper one. Gibran is quietly telling you where the answers to come will be spoken from: a man for whom ordinary life is already half a vision.

Then he turns to the sea, the “sleepless mother”, and says he will come to her as “a boundless drop to a boundless ocean.” A drop that is already boundless is not being swallowed. Going home is not getting smaller.

Among the things Almustafa says he will regret leaving are his days of pain and his nights of loneliness in the city.

True✓Correct answer

He asks “who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?” The unhappy years are part of the skin he is tearing, which is exactly why he cannot leave without a wound in the spirit.