The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
What a wonderful and mysterious story! I'm not sure what to make of The Little Prince, but it sure is magical. It opens with the narrator speaking of his childhood imagination and how, as he grew up, he could find no one to relate to, that is, until he experienced an accident with his plane in the Sahara Desert. While fixing his plane and running out of time and water, he encounters the Little Prince. The Little Prince is from another planet far away - a very small planet. (Thus, on his own planet, though he is fragile and childlike, he is still very much larger-than-life.) On this planet lives the Prince's prized possession, a single rose with four thorns. It is a fragile rose - defenseless and somewhat arrogant, and yet the Little Prince loves it so. The narrator learns of the Prince's travels over planets with self-absorbed kings, geographers who will not explore their world, frustrated businessmen, hedonistic alcoholics, and conceited men. None are happy! The Prince, however, is very happy. His secret: a childlike fascination with life, his love of his one rose, and his motto: "What is essential is invisible to the eye. For example, he says, "What makes a desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well." The narrator responds, "Yes. The house, the stars, the desert - what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible!" Looking with wonder on the sleeping Prince, the narrator says, "What moves me so deeply, about this little prince who is sleeping here, is his loyalty to a flower - the image of a rose that shines through his whole being like the flame of a lamp, even when he is asleep." Later, the Little Prince offers this, "The men where you live raise five thousand roses in the same garden - and they do not find in it what they are looking for... And yet what they are looking for could be found in one single rose... But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart." In order to return to his planet, the Little Prince must willingly allow himself to be bitten by a roving snake in the desert. Though the narrator tries to convince him otherwise, the Prince assures him that this is how it must be. And, after all, once a snake bites, "they have no more poison for a second bite." I'll admit that I may be reading my own faith into the Little Prince, but he sure comes across as a fragile, mysterious, child-like, Christ-figure. He sees what others don't see. He is completely in love with his little rose. He loves to waste time with it. And he descends to this planet in order to encourage the lost and then ascends through a self-giving sacrifice that drains the snake of its poison. In the end, we learn that "Only the children know what they are looking for. They waste their time over a rag doll and it becomes very important to them." This sounds a lot like, "Unless you become like children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven."