[Greetings from a Greyhound bus traveling down I-35 with nothing but Midwest plains to keep me company! The bus is taking me from Minneapolis to Des Moines before another bus takes me from Des Moines to Omaha. It’s eight hours of isolation, with nothing to do but read, write, and organize my thoughts. It may seem strange to some, but boy, do I love it.
I do a decent amount of traveling in the ordinary course of my life. This often requires staying in the homes of others, whether it’s a friend’s house (like it was in Minneapolis) or the house of an Airbnb host. One of my favorite hobbies in these adventures is finding a book I’ve never read on the shelves of the place that welcomes me and reading it (to the frustration of the four books I packed with me). Stashed on the shelves of a home in the mountains of Montana, I found Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” and a biography of Michelangelo. Both quickly became all-time favorites. Most recently, I picked out a story titled “The Little Prince” from a retreat center in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica and devoured it. Two weeks later, I find the Little Prince still alive in my life. So it is to this fairy tale that I devote the remainder of this post.]
Written by the French pilot and author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (first published in the U.S. in 1943) follows a plane-wrecked aviator visited by a mysterious little prince new to Earth. Over eight days, while the narrator (the planewrecked Aviator) attempts to repair his plane, the Little Prince recounts his life story and the fairy tale unfolds.
But before we summarize the plot and my reflections, a few words about the author are in order.
The Author
Saint-Exupéry began his military service in 1921 and his flying lessons shortly after. Not long into his aviation career, he experienced his first of many crashes before leaving the French Air Force to take an office job. But by 1926, he was flying again—becoming a pioneer of international postal flight. It was then that his first novella, The Aviator, was published.
In 1931, his publication of Night Flight established him as a rising star in the literary world. Over the rest of his time on Earth, Saint-Exupéry led a mixed life as an aviator, journalist, author, and publicist.
When World War II started in 1939, Saint-Exupéry joined the French Air Force, flying reconnaissance missions until France’s armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilized by the French Air Force, he traveled to the United States and spent two years persuading the U.S. government to enter the war against Nazi Germany.
Twenty-eight months after he arrived in the U.S., Saint-Exupéry got his wish and left the States with the American troops bound for North Africa. There, he joined the Free French Air Force. Flying a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean on July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupéry and his plane disappeared. In 2000, the wreckage of his plane was discovered off the coast of Marseille, but the cause of the crash and details of the pilot’s ultimate fate remain unknown.1
Turning our attention to the topic of this post, The Little Prince, we find a fairy tale with a setting inspired by actual events in Saint-Exupéry’s life. On December 30, 1935, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, were attempting to break the speed record for a Paris-to-Saigon flight in a then-popular type of air race called a raid, that had a prize of 150,000 francs. In their attempt, the pair crashed in the Sahara desert and faced rapid dehydration in the desert heat. Lost in the dunes with a few grapes, a thermos of coffee, a single orange, and some wine, the two only had a day’s worth of liquid. Both began to see mirages and quickly began hallucinating. They were so dehydrated by the second and third days that they stopped sweating altogether. On the fourth day, a nomad on a camel came across them and administered a native rehydration treatment, miraculously saving their lives.
Emerging from that experience, the stage was set for The Little Prince to arrive on paper.
The Story
The basics are this: after the narrating Aviator offers a few initial observations on the unfortunate part of life we call “growing up,” he recalls his encounter with the Little Prince. Downed in the desert with eight days of runway, the plane-wrecked pilot we’ll call the Aviator is visited by a strange young man. We first learn that this young, blonde boy known as the Little Prince has traveled to Earth from his home—an asteroid scarcely larger than himself (known as “B 612”) that he shares with just a few small volcanoes and a single rose.
Over the course of eight days, as the pilot tries to repair his plane, the Little Prince shares the details of his life. The Little Prince tells of his days cleaning volcanoes and pulling out baobab trees, each of which, if left untended to, would destroy everything. He speaks of his love and care for the rose he left back home (because he felt the rose was taking advantage of him—exaggerating her struggles to gain attention and constantly convincing him to do things, like make a glass globe, to protect her).
He speaks of the six other planets he visited before Earth, each of which was inhabited by an irrational grown-up: (1) the king with no kingdom, for whom all people are potential subjects and all things are his to order; (2) a conceited man with no admirers, for whom all people exist only to adore him; (3) a drunkard caught in a shame spiral, drinking to forget the shame of drinking; (4) a businessman blind to the beauty of the stars, caring only about counting and subduing them; (5) a lamplighter wasting his life blindly following orders that make no sense (lighting lamps on a planet where a full day only lasts a minute; darkness, only a few seconds); and (6) a geographer who has never been anywhere or seen the things that he records.
He recalls how the geographer told him he ought to visit Earth next, where he would find a land where his rose was not unique, populated by 111 kings, 7,000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 lamplighters, 311,000,000 conceited men, and about 2,000,000,000 grown-ups in total.
He recollects his first days on Earth, finding a row of rosebushes and being broken by the sight. Having once thought his rose was unique and now convinced his rose has lied about her uniqueness, the Little Prince started weeping. There, a fox found him and taught him two essential things: “You can only see things clearly with your heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”2 And the time we spend loving and caring for something will make it always unique and special to us; his rose will always be more precious than any of the others because of their time together. “It is the time you have ‘wasted’ on your rose that makes your rose so important.”3
The Little Prince concludes his story with the memories of the railway switchman and merchant he met. The railway switchman told him how passengers were always rushing to the next stop, never content with their current location; only the children among them ever bothered to look out the windows. The merchant boasted about his latest product, a pill that eliminated the need to drink for a week and saved the average consumer 53 minutes a week.
By the time his stories stop, the Little Prince and the Aviator are dying of thirst. Nearly all of the eight days the Aviator had to spare have passed. The Little Prince, visibly drained by the sadness of his story, finds a well and prolongs their lives a little longer. But both know the time has come for them to separate.
The Aviator finds the Little Prince talking to a snake about taking his life so he might return to his asteroid. The Aviator mourns the realization of what’s about to happen, and the Little Prince consoles him with what are my favorite lines in the story:
[Little Prince:] ‘The stars men follow have different meanings. For some people - travellers - the stars are guides. For others they are merely little lights in the sky. For others still - the scientists - they are problems to be solved. For my businessman they meant gold. But for all these people, the stars are silent. For you, the stars will be as they are for no one else.’
[Aviator:] ‘What are you trying to say?’
[Little Prince:] ‘At night, when you look up at the sky, since I shall be living on a star, and since I shall be laughing on a star, for you it will be as if all the stars are laughing. You alone will have stars that can laugh!’
…
[The Little Prince to the Aviator just before the snake bites the Little Prince:] ‘You understand… It is too far. I cannot take this body along with me. It is too heavy.’ [The Aviator] said nothing. ‘Left behind, it will only be an old cast-off shell. There is nothing sad about an old shell.4
With that, the story of the Little Prince comes to a close. The Aviator finally repairs his plane and exits the desert, forever left to wonder whether the Little Prince ever returned home or if his life was now forever lost, just Saint-Exupéry’s disappearance leaves us to wonder.
The Reflections
When Life photojournalist John Phillips asked Saint-Exupéry about his inspiration for the Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry reportedly stated that one day he looked down on what he thought was a blank sheet of paper and saw a small childlike figure: “I asked him who he was,” stated Saint-Exupéry, and he replied: “I’m the Little Prince.”
Saint-Exupéry made a second reference to the Little Prince in a correspondence coming out of his trip from France to the Soviet Union. Coming across a train car of Polish families huddled together, the pilot poet reflected on the encounter:
I sat down [facing a sleeping] couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants..... This is a musician's face, I told myself. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become? When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine.... This little Mozart is condemned.5
We see this sense of a world that does its best to flatten folks into a predictable and productive box come through in The Little Prince. Each of the grown-ups visited by the Little Prince serves as a critique of modern society. All the men that the Little Prince meets on his journey have been complicit in their reduction to mere functions. The Businessman, the Geographer, and the Lamplighter have all become so singularly focused on doing their job that they’ve become blind to the beauty around them.
It’s the fate of many in a modern society that conspires to keep us quiet and compliant—offering every opportunity to distract and anesthetizing us; keeping us busy like the people observed by the railway switchman, doing anything and everything except looking closely at our world and questioning its workings.
Sitting here on this bus, I can’t help but imagine what the Little Prince would be doing if he sat in the empty seat next to me. I suspect he would have no electronics on him. Not even a book, a pen, or paper. I think he would be looking out the window with wonder at all that passes. At the magic which makes windmills catch wind and turn it into energy. At the cornfields where kernels grow into whole stalks of food and fuel. At the painted blue sky cloaked with the drifting white blankets we call clouds. At the Sun sending its rays of light from beyond it all.
Then I imagine he’d turn his attention to me and say something like: “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I’d nod in agreement but wouldn’t quite understand. “And because it is beautiful,” he’d continue, “it is useful.” At this point, the child’s wisdom would take my breath and leave too much to be pondered for me to do anything but give a soft smirk. Patting me on the shoulder as if to comfort me, he’d end the encounter with this: “I see you understand.”
And then he’d be off. And all I’d be left with is a story of Jesus:
At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who then is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” Jesus invited a little child to stand among them. “Truly I tell you,” He said, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes a little child like this in My name welcomes Me.6
—
P.S. The story’s most well-known sentence, “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux” (“One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye”) was reworded and rewritten some 15 times before reaching its final phrasing. It’s a testament to the truism that it takes tremendous effort to make something look effortless.
It also reflects how Saint-Exupéry lived in accord with his observations in Wind, Sand, and Stars about how works are made perfect (insofar as we can access perfection):
In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
[…]
There is an ancient myth about the image asleep in the block of marble until it is carefully disengaged by the sculptor. The sculptor must himself feel that he is not so much inventing or shaping the curve of breast or shoulder as delivering the image from its prison.
Legend has it that Saint-Exupéry had a habit of reading and writing while flying, occasionally being so gripped by literature that he would continue until moments before takeoff. It is reported that on one flight, he circled the airport for an hour after his return to finish reading the novel he was in the middle of. He also frequently flew with his journal to record his thoughts on the world below during long, solitary flights.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (“The Little Prince”), p. 72.
The Little Prince, p. 72.
The Little Prince, p. 85 - 87.
A Sense of Life: En Route to the U.S.S.R.
Matthew 18:1-5.