Join a community discovering how living lightly and deeply through seasonal practices of presence can heal both our scattered attention and our relationship with the living world. Because mending the world begins with mending our capacity to truly see it.
Intergalactic understanding with The Little Prince
I have just closed The Little Prince. I re-read this little book that has been sitting on my shelf for a long time. I had read it earlier, when I was just going through books people told me to read. I now want to read with a little bit more purpose, and a short story about a little prince is just the easy place to start. And, as I finished it, I wanted to write the way one writes after a long walk, slightly out of breath, and still turning something over.
I have been spending my last few years in the company of soft books like Virginia Wolff and Anne Patchett, and several others written to ask us to slow down and look at things properly. Saint-Exupéry belongs with them, I think. Though he arrives disguised as a children’s book author, and this book is disguised as a children’s book. I think that is a very clever ruse. Nobody guards against a fable.
What struck me this time, reading it at this particular bend in my life, was the fox, who teaches, “It is only with one’s heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” (Pg. 82) I have carried that line about with me for a week now like a stone in my pocket, worn smooth from handling.
The fox is the one who explains taming to the prince, that peculiar patient work of creating ties, and I keep returning to how ordinary he insists it is.
“To me, you are still just a little boy like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no deed of you. And you have no need of me either. To you, I am just a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, we shall need one another. To me, you will be unique. And I should be unique to you.” (Pg. 77)
No magic words. Just sitting a little closer each day, at the same hour if possible, until a fox among a hundred thousand foxes becomes the one fox in the world, and a boy among a hundred thousand boys becomes the one boy. It is such a plain description of friendship, really, stripped of anything performative. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. I think that line alone is worth the whole book.
I have been sitting with what that means for the shape of my own days. So much of what passes for connection now is wide and thin. The fox seems to be arguing for the opposite, for narrow and deep. Choosing a few things and staying with them long enough that they stop being general and become particular. It is not a grand instruction. It does not ask me to mend the whole world at once, which is a relief, because I do not think I ever could. It only asks me to tend what is actually within reach of my hands, the rose in front of me rather than the idea of roses everywhere.
There is a sadness in the book too, the kind Saint-Exupéry never tries to smooth over. The prince tends his one rose and loves her precisely because of the time he has spent on her, thorns and vanity and all. The tie he has formed with her is what makes her irreplaceable among all the other roses in all the other gardens, even the ones that look identical. Responsibility, in this book, is never a burden imposed from outside. It grows naturally out of having paid attention to something long enough to love it.
I do not think I would have caught half of this at twenty, when I first read it and thought it merely a lovely, sad little story about a boy who visits some odd planets. It has been seen that way since it was written. You can only find the book’s secrets after they are revealed with time, as P.L. Travers wrote for the New York Herald Tribune:
“Children quite naturally see with the heart, the essential is clearly visible to them. The little fox will move them simply by being a fox. They will not need his secret until they have forgotten it and have to find it again.” (source)
I have found it again. It has taken some living to notice that the whole book is really about attention: how rarely we give it properly, and how much depends on our giving it anyway. We befriend one fox; we tend one rose; and we mend one small corner of the world at a time.
I wanted to share it with you because I know you will not think it strange that a grown woman is writing about a children's book as though it were scripture.
With attention, and with a fox or two of my own to tame...
Saint-Exupéry, A. de. (1943). The little prince (I. Testot-Ferry, Trans.). Wordsworth Classics.
“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship,” Seneca counselled, “but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul.”
Please reply to this email to let me know what you think. We are all on a learning path.
-Phronesis-
A way of being in the world that shows concern with one’s life, with the lives of others now & in the future and all ways we touch the world.
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Join a community discovering how living lightly and deeply through seasonal practices of presence can heal both our scattered attention and our relationship with the living world. Because mending the world begins with mending our capacity to truly see it.
