The Little PrinceWritten and illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Translated from French by Katherine Woods
If this is your first time reading this book, wait for a clear evening when you can see the sky. Read it outdoors, on a warm day. A tree will help. But it’s okay if you don’t have a tree. It’s okay if the day isn’t warm. You can read it in a room with a window from where you can see the sky.
Take breaks to see the sky mellow from sunset red to soft blue. Let the sky darken. When you’ve finished the book, look through the branches, step outside or wipe away the fog you breathed on the windowpane to see a rose in a star, or find that sheep you’ve never seen have eaten up the rose. You may hear the stars laughing and, if you’re lucky, even see a little man with golden hair who never in his life let go of a question once he had asked it.[break]
This Little Man is the Little Prince whom Exupery met after crash-landing in the Sahara desert, the one who asked him for a drawing of sheep and wasn’t satisfied until he received a drawing of a box. It’s easier to carry sheep to another planet if they are in a box. The Little Prince had traveled far from his home planet Asteroid B-612 and was in need of sheep to eat the baobabs that were taking over his tiny planet.
Baobabs grow fast and the Little Prince’s planet is small. So small that he can walk across the asteroid and in one day see forty-four sunsets. So tiny that he can clean out the volcanoes – two active and one extinct – which he does daily. Because, as he says, “It is a question of discipline. When you’ve finished your own toilet in the morning, then it is time to attend to the toilet of your planet, just so, with the greatest care.” The active volcanoes are very convenient to heat up breakfast in the morning. But he cleans out the extinct one anyway because one never knows.
When the Little Prince met Exupery, he had a rose in his tiny planet which he had to save from the baobabs. He cleaned out his volcanoes, put his planet in order and left on his journey to other worlds. He met a King without subjects, a Conceited Fellow, a Tippler, a Businessman, a Geographer, and a Lamplighter. They were interesting at first but soon bored the Little Prince. Then he came to Earth, a large planet, which then had 111 kings, 7,000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 tipplers, and 311,000,000 conceited men – about 2,000,000,000 grown-ups. He met a snake, a flower, many roses, a fox, and Exupery.
Exupery understood the Little Prince, but sometimes, he too, like the grown-ups the Little Prince had met on other planets, lapsed into the idea that what he was doing was a Matter of Consequence. It made the Little Prince angry that there were people who thought it unimportant to try and understand why flowers have been growing thorns for millions of years, if sheep will eat them up anyway. Grown-ups can be odd that way.
When you love a rose in another planet, the stars are beautiful because you love a flower that cannot be seen. When you’ve read The LIttle Prince, there will be days when you may need to read the book again. But the sky will be clouded over with no stars to look at. It may be a cold, gray day when even your heart is turning blue. If those days descend, flip through the pages to meet the Little Prince and the fox who wanted to be tamed, because then it would be “as if the sun came to shine,” “because of the colour of the wheat fields.” And gift yourself again the fox’s parting secret – “that it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s book will always be a gift – beautifully wrapped and tied with his own illustrations – even more precious when given to another to be read under a starlit sky.