Books like The Prophet

The short answer: read the books that answer life's large questions in a few calm sentences, and the stories that answer them through a life. Siddhartha, The Little Prince, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Alchemist, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and, newer, SalsSky: The Chosen One are the closest.

The Prophet is almost not a story. A man named Almustafa has waited twelve years in a foreign city for the ship that will take him home. When it finally arrives, the people of the city stop him and ask him to speak before he goes: about love, marriage, children, giving, work, joy and sorrow, freedom, pain, death. He answers each in a few paragraphs of prose that reads like scripture. Then he leaves.

What people love in it is the voice: unhurried, certain, kind, and never preaching for long. The books that feel like it have that voice, or they put a teacher with that voice inside a story.

Wisdom without a plot

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is an emperor's private notes to himself about how to live, and it shares Gibran's habit of saying something enormous in a single line. Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh is a short book of reflections written on a beach, gentle and exact. Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke is ten letters to a stranger about patience and solitude, and it reads like the Prophet speaking to one person.

Wisdom inside a story

Siddhartha is the great novel of this kind: a man who hears the teacher, honours him, and still has to find it for himself. The Little Prince gives its wisdom to a fox and a small boy. The Alchemist hides its in the signs along a journey. Jonathan Livingston Seagull puts it in a gull's mouth and makes it fly.

Where SalsSky fits

SalsSky: The Chosen One is a finished mythic novel in seven chapters, set in a harbour city long before history. Like The Prophet, it has a teacher, Sophus, whose few words carry the weight; unlike The Prophet, it has a story with a great deal happening in it, including a sea that comes over the city. In the first chapter, in the scene called The Surge, when the sea comes, the book's answer to it could have come from Almustafa:

“Not hope. Not despair. Just what was true.”

It is honest to say what is different. SalsSky is a novel, long and dark in places, with hunting, grief and politics, not a book of sayings you can open anywhere. It is new and little known. And it is read on salssky.com, where Chapter One is free, about five minutes a scene, and where you can keep the lines that stop you, the way people mark up The Prophet.

How to read these books

The Prophet is usually read in pieces: the chapter on marriage at a wedding, the chapter on death at a funeral. That is a good way to read all of these. Find the passage for the season you are in, and stay with it longer than feels necessary.

A question to carry

If somebody stopped you on the way out of the place you have lived for years and asked you to say one true thing about it, what would you say?