Reading Clint's wish list makes me wonder if some of Kahlil Gibran's other books deal with some of these issues. I shall investigate.

However, I think that there is a compositional reason that these topics were left out of The Prophet. I feel like this book is supposed to be a handbook of humanist philosophy; that is, I think Gibran intends that by reading this book, the reader might get an idea about how to live. I feel like he would have declared war to be outside the sphere of individual (well, most individuals) influence, and therefore out of place in The Prophet. All in all, I think the book is more properly thought of as a guidebook rather than musings. I don't much go in for books like this at all usually, but this book seems to merit further consideration. Maybe it's just so short that I didn't have time to get irritated.

Summarizing this book on the way back from DC, I said that I thought the general thesis of this book is that, in order to best live, we ought to maximize our humanity -- we should completely engage in all these things that Gibran would say are essential to being human.

Here are the things that the Prophet didn't talk about, but that I would have liked to have heard his opinion on:
Technology
Humor
Boredom
Dating/Sex
Television
Education

I am Secret!

So, since I'm the only one posting, I thought I'd add something else on which I was hoping for input. What do we think is the Prophet's "deeper secret"?

These things he said in words. But much in his heart remained unsaid. For he himself could not speak his deeper secret.

From page 7 of my edition, in the first chapter, after the ship comes in and just before the elders address the prophet.

I'm tempted to relate this to my earlier obsession with Almitra, but that may just be me.

Once when I was in San Diego I almost bought some Calamity juice.

I'm finishing up The Prophet and will get my post on this weekend. I hope everyone's enjoying it. For next time, I vote for Calamity Physics, because I like the title. That is all.

jeniscrazy...crazy about tagging!

Oh, um, by the way. I am a new-wave digital librarian. I like tagging and so on. So when you write new posts, try to fill in the the "labels for this post" with tags/labels/metadata, whatever you want to call them. You can make up new ones or whatever, but try not to duplicate-with-slight-variation or anything. For instance, I've been using rules, suggestions, voting, and now theprophet. So you could add one like jeniscrazy or pomo or intertextuality or homoeroticism or something, but (for example) don't add election or prophet (unless this last one is about the character of the prophet or something). Super fun, right? All the labels can be seen if you click the "show all" link next to the label box, or if you click "edit posts" under the "posts"/"posting" tab on the dashboard. If you click on a label, it will show you all the posts with that label. And so, in a few months, we can check back to see how much we talked about homoeroticism or how jeniscrazy, or (more usefully), see all the posts containing book suggestions. Mmm, classification goodness!

I've sort of...um, been editing other people's posts to add labels. I feel sorta bad about that. I can't help myself! The post looks so lonely when it's not labeled correctly! I may continue this trend, and maybe we should just say that anyone can label anyone else's post with a topic, if they feel as though the original poster forgot something, or if a new topic comes up in comments or something. Or, we can declare even this minor sort of post-tampering verboten, and I'll try my hardest to resist the siren's song of folksonomy...