#48 The Little Prince

I have a thing for children’s books.  The best class I ever took in college was Children’s Literature, which was no less than playtime for me.  This was where I fell in love with “Red Riding Hood” all over again and discovered how nearly every nursery rhyme through the centuries was a cry from tired mothers trying to justify infanticide.

So I was excited when that ridiculously long list I committed myself to included The Little Prince by Antoinne de Saint-Exupéry.  It’s one I had been meaning to take an hour to read but somehow kept pushing aside for other things (like the next installment of Bleach).

The story is a simple love story about a boy who lives on an asteroid.  It’s a small world but he takes good care of it.  He grows a rose on his asteroid but after a fight, he goes away on a journey that takes him to six different asteroids with their own lonely and foolish indigents until finally he makes his way to Earth and realizes that he wants to go back home to his rose.

I later discovered how big a deal this book is in France.  In that country, they voted it as the best book of the 20^th Century.  I’m not going to go that far, but hey, they have every right to be proud that this was written by one of their own people, and during the World War II days, I’d say this was a fairy tale that needed to be brought during that era.

It’s easy to focus on the main message, which is conveyed by the fox, who speaks some great truths about relationships and responsibility, especially in his statement, “It is the time you have lost for your rose that makes your rose so important.”  It brought to mind Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s comment on relationships that, “Love is spelled T-I-M-E.”

But that wasn’t what drew me into this lovely though slightly odd novelette.  It was his initial journey away as he went from asteroid to asteroid.  I made an odd choice of word in describing them indigents but that’s how each of them struck me.  There are a variety of characters (there is a king, a businessman, a drunkard, etc.) each of them is lacking in true wealth.  The king claims to be ruler of everything and yet he is ruler of nothing.  The businessman counts his wealth of stars, claiming them all his because nobody else has and yet he can never do anything with them.  The drunkard… well that one goes without saying.  The thing is, each plays at happiness or importance, but none of them has ever come close to what happiness is.  And what struck me is how many people I know that are just like this.

I include myself in this.  I found myself to be ridiculously like the geographer on the last asteroid, who is continually making maps for places that he has never been and never even plans to go.  As far as the world goes, I’ve studied the world from South America to China, Egypt to Rome, New Zealand to South Africa, Canada to Russia, but as for any personal experience, I’ve never been west of California and the farthest east I’ve ever been was Texas.  Despite very brief opportunities, I’ve never taken the plunge and wouldn’t even know what to do if it ever happened.

But it’s not even just travel.  Looking at my own life, I can see all the things that I’ve looked at and wanted, but never reached out to grab it or experience it.

That trip is only about a dozen pages long, but the amount of introspection and meditation they brought more than makes it worth the claim that this is a book you should read before you die.  I’m glad I let this one into my mind and my heart.