Children Don’t Lie
HAVANA TIMES – When I found out that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had been born on June 29, it was easy for me to remember because it coincided with the birthday of a high school classmate.
Life, relentless as it is, ended up dissolving even that friend and confidante of so many secrets and dreams. We live in the same neighborhood but never see each other. Yet the author of The Little Prince remains in the unconditional closeness of the dead, and every year, on this day, I remember him.
It was in the full force and fierceness of my youth that this work came into my life—something that can’t merely be considered a book, but a kind of initiation. Once you read it, you don’t come back as the person you were.
There’s a process of maturation. Something that usually happens with a transcendent journey or after an experience that shakes us—like the loss of someone dearly loved. But it’s a sweet shake, not a violent one.
Just imagine. We travel through part of the universe hand in hand with a child (not from Earth). It’s a clear and unburdened gaze. This child might make you laugh with his innocent remarks, but he has a very old soul. So old that he chooses to return to his tiny asteroid, shedding his body through the bite of a snake.
He had lived long enough to grow weary of the world. He had known responsibility (taking care of his small planet), the complications of love (the rose), and the availability of pleasure—like when he watched 43 sunsets in a row! Traveling through the stars, he had seen greed, selfishness, and learned through the purest kind of friendship (the fox). Earth, with its beings running frantically back and forth, disconnected from one another, seemed to him a strange and inhospitable place.
I believe Exupéry, a pioneer of aviation and a witness to a turbulent time (World War II), poured into this book a kind of natural despair at the triumph of dehumanization—and, at the same time, a deep certainty that innocence could still prevail against it all.
Without philosophical or religious theorizing, only with the subtle power of poetry, this story makes us aware of the reality of our transitoriness on Earth and, astonishingly, of the beauty of that condition.
Like those beautifully raw lines by Tagore:
“We snatch our flowers in mid-flight, lest the winds steal them. Our blood ignites and our eyes brighten as we steal kisses that would fade away if we forgot them. Our life is ambition, and our desire is vigor, for time tolls its death bells. Brother, remember this—and rejoice.” (…)
I’ve thought that the Little Prince was an angel who accompanied Exupéry when he thought he was dying after a plane crash in the Sahara Desert, where he was stranded for days with barely any supplies. I’ve thought that during his flights, the sky showed him landscapes where the physical world fades, and he witnessed regions that only mystics have half-described.
In every paragraph of the book pulses the vastness of the sky he traversed with remarkable courage, in the dawn of aviation. He wasn’t just a skilled pilot… he was the giant soul of a writer who could objectively soar to great heights, see, and understand the fragility of physical existence and the triviality of human conflicts.
In these times of war and heightened political tensions, the message of The Little Prince resounds with the urgency of that water the pilot gave him from the well: we need peace and love, responsibility and compassion.
Nothing else can give meaning to these lives that slip away so quickly—like the rope through that pulley he drew.
At night, when I see the red lights of a plane crossing the sky, I think of Antoine de Saint-Exupery and once again believe in the essence of this tormented humanity. The path to restoration is right there. Just a thought away.
A short boat ride from the coast of Marseille, in a quiet corner of the Mediterranean Sea surrounded by pale white rocks, lie the remains of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s P-38 Lightning at the bottom of the sea.
“This is it—after so many years of searching in the Mediterranean, we found the remains of Saint-Exupery’s plane,” said Vanrell, in an interview with journalist Mike Lanchin for the BBC’s Witness History program.