A children's book for adults.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a pioneering aviator in the dangerous early days of flight, and he really did crash in the Sahara, nearly dying of thirst before nomads found him. Out of that world of open cockpits and desert nights he wrote a slim, hand-illustrated story that looks like a children's book and has quietly become one of the most read and most translated works ever published.
It tells of a pilot stranded in the desert who meets a small prince fallen from a tiny asteroid, and of the prince's travels among strange grown-ups on other planets, a king with no subjects, a businessman counting stars he thinks he owns, a lamplighter following an order that no longer makes sense. Each is a gentle portrait of an adult who has lost the plot, mistaking possession, importance or routine for a life.
The book's most quoted line is spoken by a fox the prince befriends and then must leave. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, the fox tells him. What is essential is invisible to the eye. The whole story is an argument for that sentence, a plea to protect the way of seeing we are born with and are slowly trained out of, the capacity for wonder, attachment and love that the busy adult world dismisses as childish.
Saint-Exupéry did not live to see the book become what it became. A year after it appeared he flew a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean and never returned, vanishing into the sea he had so often crossed. The story he left behind kept flying.
For anyone who makes things, especially anyone who fears their playfulness is unserious, the book is a quiet defence of exactly that instinct. The most important truths are often the simplest, and they are best carried not by cleverness but by wonder. The child's eye is not something to grow out of. It is something to guard.
What did you see clearly as a child that the grown-up world has taught you to ignore?
