A few summers ago, I had the great privilege (and I do intend to use the word “privilege”) to spend some weeks in Paris with my wife and daughter, and then a couple of weeks trekking with my youngest son through the Picos de Europa mountains in northern Spain. It was a wonderful summer.
Knowing that I would be in France and then in the mountains of Spain, I could not help but think of the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Although he is best known for his book, The Little Prince, which he wrote while staying in New York in the early 1940s, Saint-Exupéry was at heart a pilot, cutting his teeth flying mail planes around southern France and Spain in the 1920s.
During my time in Paris and then Spain, I carried, read, and reread his Wind, Sand and Stars, in which he tells how and why he became a pilot during the early and dangerous days of aviation. This book is often found on “top ten” lists of great works about adventure.
At the risk of sounding like a language snob, Exupéry is one of those authors that you should read in his native language if you hope to swim down to the depths of his subtlety and meaning. There is never an absolute, word-for-word translation from one language to another, and something, as the saying goes, always gets lost.
That being said, I would still encourage you to read Exupéry in English. As you do, remember that, being French, Exupéry is often getting at much more than you read on the page. As the fox tells the Little Prince in the book of the same name, “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” which translates to, “One only sees well with the heart. The essential [things] are invisible to the eyes.” I could not agree more.
Although Wind, Sand and Stars is a more straightforward, narrated adventure book than The Little Prince, with hair-raising accounts of near-fatal flights over the Pyrenees and the Andes Mountains, Saint-Exupéry spends a good portion of the work encouraging the reader to carefully consider one’s approach to life. Above all else, Exupéry exhorts his readers to act heroically and see life for what it is: The grandest of adventures.
In typical French fashion, Exupéry illustrates his call to live life with bravery and purpose in the negative, that is, by telling us what we ought not to be and how we ought not to act. One passage stands out, in which Exupéry describes a man whom he would often see on the early-morning bus to the airport in Toulouse, France. The man was, from Exupéry’s description, a bureaucrat of some kind, with a neatly brushed coat and a briefcase that looked as if it never traveled past the handful of miles between the man’s home, his office, and back:
“Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet, and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”
Exupéry is not criticizing those who work in offices or for governments. Rather, he is taking issue with those who never venture out, those who cut themselves off from big, uncomfortable issues and from asking difficult questions, especially about themselves. He is criticizing those who never move out of their comfort zone, never set out towards (from “ad,” Latin for “to” or “towards” something) any sort of “venture,” that is, “adventure.”
Adventure, it is important to note, does not always equal travel. I have known some people (though not many) who travel while never venturing very far from themselves. They leave their house, but not their insistence on how things “should be,” what languages other people “should speak,” or what food they, the “others,” “should eat.” They move from place to place, but refuse to leave the comfort of themselves.
What Exupéry was driving at, as Steven Pressfield wrote in The War of Art, is that to venture out is to drive towards, to seek out, our vocation, our calling, and then act on it. We should push ourselves to answer the call of things larger, and as such, more difficult than ourselves.
In doing so, we should not be afraid to ask (and answer) the uncomfortable questions of “who am I?” and “why am I here?”
Once we honestly answer these questions, we should then ask ourselves, “Am I doing what I am meant to be…, or not?” “Am I a writer who doesn’t write?” “Am I the painter who doesn’t paint?” “Am I the entrepreneur who never starts a new venture?” “Am I the parent without children?” Do I dare, as T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock asks, “squeeze the universe into a ball,” and “roll it towards some overwhelming question?” Or do we wall ourselves in, guarding against discomfort, challenge, or even pain?
To answer the questions of who we are and why we are here takes courage. To act on the answers is heroism and the beginning of an adventure. The first step of any venture is, then, to push back against the fear and resistance of complacency – and then act. As St. John Paul II put it to some two million people at World Youth Day, 2000: “Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch,” and have yourself the grandest adventure of your lifetime.