I first read “The Little Prince” when I was seven, and Dad was impressed that I could understand such a difficult book. I was baffled by his reaction – I had read many longer and more difficult books, like “The Six Bullerby Children”, and there was nothing particularly difficult about “The Little Prince”. There were no words I couldn’t understand, the plot was weird but I could follow it, and the morals were pretty transparent. When I reread the book in school at 14, I took my teacher’s word for it being a book for children at least my age, or maybe even grownups, and acknowledged that there was a lot of metaphor and moral guidance in it that young children wouldn’t get. But at some level I wasn’t convinced – I didn’t think I found any messages in it at 14 that I had missed at 7. Friendship and love are important, one should be a child at heart, look with your heart, not your eyes – these are the trite wisdoms a child is fed almost from the moment it learns to speak. At 7 my reaction was “of course”, at 14 it was “this is waaay oversimplified”. At 21 fragments made me cry.
It is difficult to explain what caused my change of attitude towards the book after those final seven years. It wasn’t that I found any hidden meaning in it that I hadn’t noticed before – not any particularly important meaning, anyway. I did become aware of how the Rose symbolized women in general and the author’s wife in particular – and was angered by the unflattering and stereotypical picture this gave. But noticing a few extra – often annoying! – metaphors could hardly have made me enjoy the book more. What happened instead, I think, is that I had in the meantime developed more of an aesthetic sense. My change in attitude towards “The Little Prince” was in some ways analogous to my change in attitude towards paintings, from a literal approach to a more colour- and composition-based one. Or, for a better analogy, it was similar to the way Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, which had been one of my earliest favourite pieces, became different, and in some ways fuller, over the years.
For a clearer picture of how my view of the book had evolved, take the oft-quoted wisdom passed to the Little Prince by the Fox: “One sees well only with the heart. What is most important is invisible to the eyes.” As a seven-year-old, I thought “Well, obviously. Mom and Dad always said so, doesn’t everyone know this?” As a fourteen-year-old semi-empiricist: “Obviously not. At best this is a meaningless metaphor. At worst it suggests that there are things we do not have any evidence for which are actually incredibly important, which is silly.” As a 21-year-old, I read the Fox’s wisdom in the context of the chapter I have taken it out of [1]. The Fox had been talking about how even though those close to us are objectively no different from thousands, millions of other people, because we have “tamed” them – and they us – to us they are endlessly different from everyone else. Thus the thought expressed in those two sentences is that oftentimes what is important is not people in themselves, but their relationships to others. The sentences can also be seen as stressing the importance of subjectivity – perhaps even the objectivity of subjectivity – the fact, perhaps forgotten by some adults, that the emotional impact and the memories brought back by certain objects, places, people, and the way particular individuals see these objects, places and people, is for humans a tremendously important feature of the world.
Everyone knows “The Little Prince” is not really a book for children. Despite the dedication, it is also not a book for the children the adults reading it once were – it is, instead, a book for the adults that the children reading it grow up to be. But because it is a book to grow up to, it teaches us something which, in one of its many oversimplifications, it explicitly denies – that it is better to be an adult than a child. No child, no matter how sensitive, really understands “The Little Prince”. No child sees the beauty of a sunset like an adult does – when she bothers to look. Saint-Exupéry tells us to look around us, like a child does – but to use our grown-up eyes for it. Something is lost when we grow up, of course, but if that something is the price we have to pay to appreciate “The Little Prince”, I’m willing to pay it.
[1] It’s a pity that this fragment is quoted so often without any context – the reason the Little Prince repeats and memorizes it is not, I think, because it’s a wisdom in its own right, but because it is a summary of everything the Fox had previously said to him. But it’s a summary which only makes sense if one had previously read the Fox’s words.
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