The constellation Canis Minor is made up of only two stars. That's all you need to tell a story or to make meaning: one thing connected to another. Some of the best stories are built on a panoply of connections that all come together in the end, while some focus on a simple few. Either way, it's the connection that counts.
Here is a lesson in value that I stumbled upon: a connection between words written by Khalil Gibrán and Henry David Thoreau in different times, languages, and places.
Gibrán was an early 20th-century writer known especially for his poetic prose and his classic work, The Prophet. Thoreau was a naturalist and philosopher who wrote in the mid-19th-century about everything from the marvels of the natural world to civil disobedience. Engaging with each of these thinkers (in Gibrán's The Broken Wings and Thoreau's Walden), I discovered two lines that each reminded me of the other writer: a concept that Gibrán and Thoreau had both landed upon, in their own way, about where value truly lies.
In Gibrán's The Broken Wings, an unnamed narrator (based on Gibrán himself, so I've read) tells the tragic story of how he and a young woman named Selma fell in love and were parted. It was more sorrowful than Tristan and Iseult, by my reckoning, and no less tender:
“Her hand was still on my head as she spoke, and I would not have preferred a royal crown or a wreath of glory to that beautiful smooth hand whose fingers were twined in my hair.”
Here, the narrator knows that a gentle, loving touch is of more value than the power, prestige, or adulation associated with a costly (or even a symbolic) crown. There is a word in Portuguese—cafuné—which means to tenderly run your fingers through a loved one's hair. Gibrán recognized the beauty and value of such a gesture, placing it above the most conventional measures of success.
Thoreau notices something similar in Walden, which is a reviving as well as a nourishing read. He spent two years living alone in the wilderness at Walden Pond and wrote a good deal amid his long walks and the spacious, contemplative hours. One of my favorite lines (though not pertaining to the matter at hand) is his famous:
"I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance."
There were many more things in that book that I felt obliged to write down in my notes, but here is one of the lines that especially spoke to me, in relation to what Gibrán said:
"I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn."
An epaulet (I had to look it up at the time) is a fancy shoulder piece: a sign of distinguishment and rank in some militaries. I love that Thoreau preferred the sparrow and (having read much of the book and gotten to know him a little by this point) I wasn't the least bit surprised that he would.
To be chosen by a wild bird for a safe landing place is not something you can acquire with superficial rank or a powerful self-invention. To be chosen is real to an extent that it cannot be forced. In fact, it is the opposite of force that one must embody to hope for any such thing.
In both of these cases—Thoreau with his bird and Gibrán with the hand of a person he loves—there is an expression of value that dethrones all the rank and glory and made-up treasures and focuses on the real. In their worlds, beauty, love, and simplicity are more valuable: preferable over power, rank, and manmade glory. Nothing is valuable, in the end, unless we value it. This is up to us. Each Gibrán and Thoreau, in saying that he would prefer a bird over an epaulet, or a loving gesture over a crown, is deciding where his own treasure lies.
Wishing You Boundless Peace and Very Good Books,
Victoria Murgante
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