"The Little Prince" Finds a Home
For My Friend
I listened to this audiobook and watched its respective movie.
I didn’t get it, but I very, very much wanted to. It’s a coming-of-age story, it’s about loneliness and human connection, it’s about trust and greed and love. God is it about what love is. And what it isn’t.
It is so many things, wrapped in the loose form of a book, the pages reminding us of its medium but its words doing nothing to actually make that mean anything.
It’s a fable, a children’s bedtime story, a parable we tell ourselves when we reach adulthood and realize that it’s not all it’s chalked up to be.
“All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems... But all these stars are silent. You-You alone will have stars as no one else has them.”
One of my best friends loves this book. I thought it a children’s story and something to be brought out at nursery’s or for light reading.
Boy was I wrong.
This story sears your soul and profoundly calls you out for living as an adult when you want to be a child. It gently reminds us to be kind to ourselves and to hold that inner voice with soft hands.
“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”
To be honest, this book does feel like an acid trip. Our Little Prince goes off on adventure after adventure, seemingly with no real direction besides running away from his Rose, which has hurt him so.
He meets a myriad of people and he quips with them and questions them but it all comes down to the Little Prince traveling as a child, and coming into this world with his pure innocence and guileless attitude. For what can be done or said to a child to impart the gravity of a situation? Why is it important for a child to understand that sometimes, things just suck and they suck without reason? Why do we lose the light in our eyes to see the world as dirty and imperfect as it truly is?
The Little Prince doles out and receives token bits of wisdom and knowledge throughout the story. Each moment is a stand-alone piece that can be interpreted and loved in so many ways. Moments that examine the harsh realities of our world and question it with the honest intention of a child: “Why why why? And why not?”
I could honestly see an Etsy store cobbling these popular lines together and making some sort of banner reminiscent of the Live, Laugh, Love era.
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
As an adult trying to discern meaning from what is so obviously not your standard novel or movie, this feels unsettling. We expect order and logic. Here, none of that exists, and more of the themes are dished out in short stories and bursts of unusual narration.
Yet in spite of this unusualness, I took so much away from this tale. For once in my ridiculous life, this isn’t about the story. It’s about the feeling imbued in simplicity. It’s the feeling of being seen and heard as an adult being perceived by a children’s novel.
When you look at this book at face value, it’s a fun mix of stories as the Little Prince tries to find a home.
When you read between the lines and realize that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was forgiving adults for being too grown to understand that in a world as cruel and callous as ours, sometimes the view through a child’s eyes is the most precious thing we can hold onto.
“What matters most are the simple pleasures so abundant that we can all enjoy them...Happiness doesn’t lie in the objects we gather around us. To find it, all we need to do is open our eyes.”