If you attended a non-traditional wedding during the 1970s, you no doubt heard a few quotes from Kahlil Gibran’s bestselling book, The Prophet, during the service. Sample:

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Gibran lags only Shakespeare and Lao-tzu as a best-selling poet. The first printing of The Prophet in 1923 quickly sold out and sold steadily ever since. To date nine millions copies have been printed in English alone. In the 1960s, sales zoomed to nearly 5,000 copies a week.

While touring Lebanon in 1973, an Arabic speaking friend took me to Gibran’s native village. I was introduced as a distant American relative and greeted warmly. (Indeed, I was greeted warmly everywhere in Lebanon.) But they gave me special access to Gibran’s childhood home. I felt honored.

I knew nothing of Gibran the man until reading the January New Yorker. Which was no accident:

Part of the reason there were no real biographies is that little was known about Gibran’s life, and the reason for that is that he didn’t want it known. One point that seems firm is that he was born in Lebanon, in a village called Bsharri, in 1883. At that time, Lebanon was part of Syria, which in turn was part of the Ottoman Empire. Gibran, by his account, was a brooding, soulful child. From his earliest years, he said, he drew constantly—painting was his first art and, for a long time, as important to him as writing—and he communed with nature. When a storm came, he would rip off his clothes and run out into the torrent in ecstasy. His mother, Kamileh, got others to leave her strange boy alone. “Sometimes,” Gibran later recalled, “she would smile at someone who came in . . . and lay her finger on her lip and say, ‘Hush. He’s not here.’ ”

He wasn’t in Lebanon long, either. His father got busted for embezzlement, leaving the family destitute, so his mother emigrated with the kids to Boston. His timing was perfect, arriving at a time when…

…In European art, this was the period of the Decadents. Theosophy, espoused by Madame Blavatsky, became a craze. People went to séances, dabbled in drugs, and scorned the ugly-hearted West in favor of the more spiritual East. Above all, they made a religion of art. Day, thirty-two years old and financially independent, was a leader of the Boston outpost of this movement. He wore a turban, smoked a hookah, and read by candlelight.

He did serious work, however. He and his friends founded two arts magazines, and he was a partner in a publishing house that produced exquisite books. By the eighteen-nineties, though, Day’s main interest was photography. He particularly liked to photograph beautiful young boys of “exotic” origin, sometimes nude, sometimes in their native costumes, and he often recruited them from the streets of the South End. When the thirteen-year-old Gibran turned up at Day’s door, in 1896, he became one of the models. Day was especially taken with Gibran. He made him his pupil and assistant, and he introduced him to the literature of the nineteenth century, the Romantic poets and their Symbolist inheritors.

To say more is to spoil the story. Suffice it to say, Gibran turns out to be less of an inspired poet than an ambitious user who was in the right place at the right time with the right message.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

Read the whole thing.