Khalil Gibran, Autorretrato Con Musa, 1911, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As happens so often, I’ve just discovered another wonderful thing because of the great Maria Popova of Brain Pickings. If there is only one website or blog you follow, I recommend that one be Brain Pickings. Literature, history, philosophy, art, poetry, children’s books, all of these and more are topics of discussion there, and the writing is beautiful.

This time, the discovery is the artist, writer, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran, and his take on a question I and I’m sure all other artists and writers ask ourselves from time the time: why we constantly feel the driving need to create things.

Popova writes:

The questions of why we humans create — why we paint caves and canvases, why we write novels and symphonies, why we make art at all — is so perennial that it might indeed fall within the scope of what Hannah Arendt considered the “unanswerable questions” central to the human experience. And yet some memorable answers have been given — answers like Pablo Neruda’s stirring childhood allegory of the hand through the fence.

Another exquisite answer comes from the great Arab-American artist, poet, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) in Beloved Prophet (public library) — the collection of his almost unbearably beautiful love letters to and from Mary Haskell…

Read the article in full at Brain Pickings

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