Hatice Ahu Sağlam-Gülümcan
Silent Sorrow
My neighbors, you remember the dawn of youth with pleasure
and regret its passing; but I remember it like a prisoner who
recalls the bars and shackles of his jail. You speak of those
years between infancy and youth as a golden era free from
confinement and cares, but I call those years an era of silent
sorrow which dropped as a seed into my heart and grew with it
and could find no outlet to the world of Knowledge and wisdom
until love came and opened the heart's doors and lighted its
corners. Love provided me with a tongue and tears.
Every time I went to the fields I returned disappointed, without
understanding the cause of my disappointment. Every time I looked
at the gray sky I felt my heart contract. Every time I heard
the singing of the birds and babbling of the spring I suffered
without understanding the reason for my suffering. It is said
that unsophistication makes a man empty and that emptiness
makes him carefree.
That sorrow which obsessed me during my youth was not caused by
lack of amusement, because I could have had it; neither from
lack of friends, because I could have found them. That sorrow
was caused by an inward ailment which made me love solitude.
It killed in me the inclination for games and amusement.
It removed from my shoulders the wings of youth and made me
like a pong of water between mountains which reflects in its
calm surface the shadows of ghosts and the colors of clouds
and trees, but cannot find an outlet by which to pass singing to the sea.
Thus was my life before I attained the age of eighteen. That year is
like a mountain peak in my life, for it awakened knowledge in me and
made me understand the vicissitudes of mankind. In that year I was
reborn and unless a person is born again his life will remain like
a blank sheet in the book of existence. In that year, I saw the angels
of heaven looking at me through the eyes of a beautiful woman.
I also saw the devils of hell raging in the heart of an evil man.
He who does not see the angels and devils in the beauty and malice
of life will be far removed from knowledge, and his spirit will be
empty of affection.
From"The broken Wings
Khalil Gibran
All those beauties which I speak of now and which I long to see,
as a child longs for his mother's breast, wounded my spirit,
imprisoned in the darkness of youth, as a falcon suffers in its
cage when it sees a flock of birds flying freely in the spacious
sky. Those valleys and hills fired my imagination, but bitter
thoughts wove round my heart a net of hopelessness.
Louis Rémy Mignot Art
It may be true among those who were born
dead and who exist like frozen corpses; but the sensitive boy
who feels much and knows little is the most unfortunate creature
under the sun, because he is torn by two forces. The first force
elevates him and shows him the beauty of existence through a cloud
of dreams; the second ties him down to the earth and fills his eyes
with dust and overpowers him with fears and darkness.
Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps
the heart and makes it ache with sorrow. Solitude is the ally
of sorrow as well as a companion of spiritual exaltation.
The boy's soul undergoing the buffeting of sorrow is like a white
lily just unfolding. It trembles before the breeze and opens
its heart to daybreak and folds its leaves back when the shadow
of night comes. If that boy does not have diversion or friends
or companions in his games his life will be like a narrow prison
in which he sees nothing but spiderwebs and hears nothing but the crawling of insects.
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