Remembrance of My Youth

Remembering the dawn of your youth pours a balm of happiness over your heart, although you regret the flight of those happy days.

As for myself, I remember it as a liberated slave cherishes the recollection of his prison walls and the links of his chains.

You speak of those years which stretch between childhood and youth like a golden age that laughs at the torments of life and the turning points of destiny, an age that surmounts without concern labors and misfortunes, as the bee crosses stagnant marshes in order to fly away towards gardens full of flowers.

My youth was full of mysterious and silent sorrows which lodged in my heart, they rebelled stormily in my veins and magnified throughout my adolescence.

And my sorrows found no solution in the world of Understanding until the day when my love opened the lock-gates of my heart and illuminated its dreams.

Love freed my tongue, and I spoke.
It opened my eyes, and I wept.
It loosened my throat, and I sighed.

You remember the fields, the gardens, and the public places as well as the street corners which observed your eyes and your innocent whisperings.

I too, I remember a wonderful place in north Lebanon. As soon as I close my eyes on my surroundings, wherever I am, I see again those valleys full of flowers, full of secrets and dignity, those high mountains whose majesty seems to reach the sky.

And as soon as I shut myself up into silence far from the clamor of civilizations, I hear the murmur of the streams and the rustles of the branches.

I yearn to see again all those beauties I am describing to you, as a newborn baby demands its mother's breast.

I suffered as a falcon suffers behind the bars of his cage when he catches sight of other falcons soaring happily over the vast horizon.

This same painful nostalgia took over my being during those moments of meditation and contemplation, hanging a veil of hopelessness over my heart.

I never went into the countryside without returning sad and I never knew the causes of this sadness.

I never looked at the sunset obscured by clouds without feeling the hurt of a broken heart. Even the twittering of birds and the music of the streams made me suffer, and I could not understand the reason for this unhappiness.

It is said that ignorance is the cradle of nothingness and that nothingness is the seat of unconcern.

That is only true in the case of those who exist on earth like bodies without life.

If this ignorance is increased by a fair and awakened sensitivity, it becomes more bitter than death. For a young emotional person, who feels intensely but knows little, is the most unhappy creature on earth.

He finds himself torn between two forces: an invisible force which uplifts him and shows him the beauty of existence through a mist of dreams, and a visible force which binds him to the earth, fills his eyes with dust, subjects him to fear, and leads him astray in the darkness.

Melancholy has a silken hand, but its grip is powerful.
It takes hold of the heart and afflicts it in solitude.
And this solitude, allied with melancholy, is also the companion of all spiritual exaltation.

When the soul of a young man is possessed by melancholy and solitude, it resembles a lily that is barely in flower. It trembles in the wind, opens its corolla at a dawn and closes it at nightfall.

But if this young man has no distractions to occupy his mind or companions to share his games, life will appear to him like a cramped prison where he will see only spiders' webs and hear only the muffled movements of insects.

Now, at this period, I could have entertainments and I knew where to find friends.
However, melancholy alone obsessed my heart.
It killed within me the wish to play games.
It tore from me the wings of youth and transformed my being into a pool where the water reflected the shadow of spirits, the color of clouds and the outlines of branches, without ever finding a way out which would allow it to run singing towards the sea.

That was my life until the age of eighteen.
That year of my past placed me on a mountaintop, and as I looked at the world I questioned humanity about its aspirations, its efforts, and its struggles, while I tried to understand its laws and its customs.
That year I was born anew.

For anyone whose youth is not the embryo of his sadness, whose despair is not the child of his sorrows, whose love is not the cradle of his dreams, will imagine his whole life as a blank page in the book of existence.

That year I was born a second time through the eyes of a beloved woman, whose beauty was total and complete. And through the eyes of that sublime woman the angels looked at me and at the same time I saw the angels of hell squirming and shouting in the hearts of a criminal man.

He who does not see those angels and demons through the joys and vicissitudes of life will leave his mind denuded of feeling and his heart far removed from understanding.

~Kahlil Gibran