The Beloved

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View books by John Walbridge, Kahlil Gibran, Robin Waterfield.

Enlightened and enlightening - Rated
This small book contains a collection of texts on love and 'the path of the heart', in the form of poems or poetic prose. It tells several stories of human beings who have loved and been loved. Many different stories, with diferent circumstances and different endings, but always something in common.

In the best Romantic tradition - and there are, for instance, clear echoes of Blake throughout the book - the individual is opposed to society, to established customs and practices, in his desperate and unremitting search for true love, often found outside accepted and acceptable social norms. That is the case of arranged marriages, where individuals (mostly women) are forced to submit to the will of parents or guardians and to marry against their inclinations for reasons of economic, political or social expediency. The wide gap that separates the material and often brutal world of everyday reality from the spiritual world and the higher dimensions the individual aspires to appears to be unbridgeable. But, in the end, what really matters is to choose the right world and the path that leads to happiness and fulfilment of the soul, against all odds and through all kinds of suffering. Because 'life is a paradise whose gate is the human heart'.

The subject matter is not exactly new, but the way Kahlil Gibran approaches it is original and masterful. One hears in every line the voice of the 'Prophet', the enlightened individual who has access to hidden and often invisible truths and whose mission consists in disclosing them to less clear-sighted mortals or perhaps sharing them with kindred spirits.

I would highly recommend this book to all human beings who are either alive or intending to be so in the near future. As Kahlil Gibran says in 'The Prophet', 'But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.'