Decades before artist Anne Truitt pondered the cure for our chronic self-righteousness, another extraordinary creative mind tussled with this human pathology. Among the many gems in Lebanese-American artist, poet, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran’s 1918 collection The Madman: His Parables and Poems (public library) — Gibran’s first work in English, a classic that falls somewhere between William Blake and Mary Oliver — is a short poem that speaks with great subtlety and great insight to our illusion of separateness and the self-righteousness it produces, our lamentable tendency to mistake others for interruptions and nuisances, to forget that everybody is simply doing their best in this shared experience called life.

SAID A BLADE OF GRASS

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.”

Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”

Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again — and she was a blade of grass.

And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such noise! They scatter all my winter dreams.”

For a different side of the same existential coin, treat yourself to Mary Oliver’s beautiful reading of “Wild Geese.”