The Book of Khalid by Ameen Fares Rihani (best contemporary novels .txt) 📖

Shades of Whitman! But Whitman, thou Donkey, never weeps. Whitman, if that goblin tried to silence him, would have wrung his neck, after he had ridden upon it. The above, nevertheless, deserves the space we give it here, as it shadows forth one of the essential elements of Khalid’s spiritual make-up. But this slight symptom of that disease we named, this morbidness incident to adolescence, is eventually overcome by 51 a dictionary and a grammar. Ay, Khalid henceforth shall cease to scour the horizon for that vague something of his dreams; he has become far-sighted enough by the process to see the necessity of pursuing in America something more spiritual than peddling crosses and scapulars. Especially in this America, where the alphabet is spread broadcast, and free of charge. And so, he sets himself to the task of self-education. He feels the embryo stir within him, and in the squeamishness of enceinteship, he asks but for a few of the fruits of knowledge. Ah, but he becomes voracious of a sudden, and the little pocket dictionary is devoured entirely in three sittings. Hence his folly of treating his thoughts and fancies, as he was treated by the goblin. For do not words often rob a fancy of its tongue, or a thought of its soul? Many of the pieces Khalid wrote when he was devouring dictionaries were finally disposed of in a most picturesque manner, as we shall relate. And a few were given to Shakib, of which that Dream of Cyclamens was preserved.

And Khalid’s motto was, “One book at a time.” He would not encumber himself with books any more than he would with shoes. But that the mind might not go barefoot, he always bought a new book before destroying the one in hand. Destroying? Yes; for after reading or studying a book, he warms his hands upon its flames, this Khalid, or makes it serve to cook a pot of mojadderah. In this extraordinary and outrageous manner, barbarously capricious, he would baptise the ideal in the fire of the real. And thus, glowing 52 with health and confidence and conceit, he enters another Park from which he escapes in the end, sad and wan and bankrupt. Of a truth, many attractions and distractions are here; else he could not forget the peddling-box and the light-heeled, heavy-haunched women of Battery Park. Here are swings for the mind; toboggan-chutes for the soul; merry-go-rounds for the fancy; and many devious and alluring paths where one can lose himself for years. A sanitarium this for the hebephreniac. And like all sanitariums, you go into it with one disease and come out of it with ten. Had Shakib been forewarned of Khalid’s mind, had he even seen him at the gate before he entered, he would have given him a few hints about the cross-signs and barbed-cordons therein. But should he not have divined that Khalid soon or late was coming? Did he not call enough to him, and aloud? “Get thee behind me on this dromedary,” our Scribe, reading his Al-Mutanabbi, would often say to his comrade, “and come from this desert of barren gold, if but for a day,––come out with me to the oasis of poesy.”

But Khalid would only ride alone. And so, he begins his course of self-education. But how he shall manage it, in this cart-before-the-horse fashion, the reader shall know. Words before rules, ideas before systems, epigrams before texts,––that is Khalid’s fancy. And that seems feasible, though not logical; it will prove effectual, too, if one finally brushed the text and glanced at the rules. For an epigram, when it takes possession of one, goes farther in influencing his thoughts and actions than whole 53 tomes of ethical culture science. You know perhaps how the Arabs conquered the best half of the world with an epigram, a word. And Khalid loves a fine-sounding, easy-flowing word; a word of supple joints, so to speak; a word that you can twist and roll out, flexible as a bamboo switch, resilient as a fine steel rapier. But once Shakib, after reading one of Khalid’s first attempts, gets up in the night when his friend is asleep, takes from the bottom drawer of the peddling-box the evil-working dictionary, and places therein a grammar. This touch of delicacy, this fine piece of criticism, brief and neat, without words withal, Khalid this time is not slow to grasp and appreciate. He plunges, therefore, headlong into the grammar, turns a few somersaults in the mazes of Sibawai and Naftawai, and coming out with a broken noddle, writes on the door the following: “What do I care about your theories of nouns and verbs? Whether the one be derived from the other, concerns not me. But this I know, after stumbling once or twice in your labyrinths, one comes out parsing the verb, to run. Indeed, verbs are more essential than nouns and adjectives. A noun can be represented pictorially; but how, pictorially, can you represent a noun in motion,––Khalid, for instance, running out of your labyrinths? Even an abstract state can be represented in a picture, but a transitive state never. The richest language, therefore, is not the one which can boast of a thousand names for the lion or two thousand for the camel, but the one whose verbs have a complete and perfect gamut of moods and tenses.” 54

That is why, although writing in Arabic, Khalid prefers English. For the Arabic verb is confined to three tenses, the primary ones only; and to break through any of these in any degree, requires such crowbars as only auxiliaries and other verbs can furnish. For this and many other reasons Khalid stops short in the mazes of Sibawai, runs out of them exasperated, depressed, and never for a long time after looks in that direction. He is now curious to know if the English language have its Sibawais and Naftawais. And so, he buys him a grammar, and there finds the way somewhat devious, too, but not enough to constitute a maze. The men who wrote these grammars must have had plenty of time to do a little useful work. They do not seem to have walked leisurely in flowing robes disserting a life-long dissertation on the origin and descent of a preposition. One day Shakib is amazed by finding the grammars page by page tacked on the walls of the cellar and Khalid pacing around leisurely lingering a moment before each page, as if he were in an art gallery. That is how he tackled his subject. And that is why he and Shakib begin to quarrel. The idea! That a fledgling should presume to pick flaws. To Shakib, who is textual to a hair, this is intolerable. And that state of oneness between them shall be subject hereafter to “the corrosive action of various unfriendly agents.” For Khalid, who has never yet been snaffled, turns restively from the bit which his friend, for his own sake, would put in his mouth. The rupture follows. The two for a while wend their way in opposite directions. 55 Shakib still cherishing and cultivating his bank account, shoulders his peddling-box and jogs along with his inspiring demon, under whose auspices, he tells us, he continues to write verse and gull with his brummagems the pious dames of the suburbs. And Khalid sits on his peddling-box for hours pondering on the necessity of disposing of it somehow. For now he scarcely makes more than a few peddling-trips each month, and when he returns, he does not go to the bank to add to his balance, but to draw from it. That is why the accounts of the two Syrians do not fare alike; Shakib’s is gaining in weight, Khalid’s is wasting away.

Yes, the strenuous spirit is a long time dead in Khalid. He is gradually reverting to the Oriental instinct. And when he is not loafing in Battery Park, carving his name on the bench, he is burrowing in the shelves of some second-hand book-shop or dreaming in the dome of some Broadway skyscraper. Does not this seem inevitable, however, considering the palingenetic burden within him? And is not loafing a necessary prelude to the travail? Khalid, of course, felt the necessity of this, not knowing the why and wherefor. And from the vast world of paper-bound souls, for he relished but pamphlets at the start––they do not make much smoke in the fire, he would say––from that vast world he could command the greatest of the great to help him support the loafing while. And as by a miracle, he came out of that chaos of contending spirits without a scratch. He enjoyed the belligerency of pamphleteers as an 56 American would enjoy a prize fight. But he sided with no one; he took from every one his best and consigned him to Im-Hanna’s kitchen. Torquemada could not have done better; but Khalid, it is hoped, will yet atone for his crimes.

Monsieur Pascal, with whom he quarrels before he burns, had a particular influence upon him. He could not rest after reading his “Thoughts” until he read the Bible. And of the Prophets of the Old Testament he had an especial liking for Jeremiah and Isaiah. And once he bought a cheap print of Jeremiah which he tacked on the wall of his cellar. From the Khedivial Library MS. we give two excerpts relating to Pascal and this Prophet.

“O Monsieur Pascal,

“I tried hard to hate and detest myself, as you advise, and I found that I could not by so doing love God. ’Tis in loving the divine in Man, in me, in you, that we rise to the love of our Maker. And in giving your proofs of the true religion, you speak of the surprising measures of the Christian Faith, enjoining man to acknowledge himself vile, base, abominable, and obliging him at the same time to aspire towards a resemblance of his Maker. Now, I see in this a foreshadowing of the theory of evolution, nay a divine warrant for it. Nor is it the Christian religion alone which unfolds to man the twofold mystery of his nature; others are as dark and as bright on either side of the pole. And Philosophy conspiring with Biology will not consent to the apotheosis of Man, unless he wear on his breast a symbol of his tail.... Au-revoir, Monsieur Pascal, Remember me to St. Augustine.”

“O Jeremiah,

“Thy picture, sitting among the ruins of the City of Zion, appeals to my soul. Why, I know not. It may be because I myself once sat in that posture among the ruins of my native City of Baal. But the ruins did not grieve me as did