In preparation for launching this site, I have been reading a lot of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French pilot and writer perhaps best known for his book, The Little Prince.
At the risk of sounding like a language snob, Exupéry is one of those authors that you must read in his native language if you hope to swim down to the depths of his work. There is never an absolute, word-for-word transliteration of meaning from one language to another, and something is always, as the saying goes, lost in translation.
That being said, I would still encourage you to read Exupéry in English. As you do, remember that being French, Exupéry is often talking about much more than you read on the page. As the fox tells the Little Prince in the book of the same name (spoiler alert): “Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” “Here is my secret. It is very simple. One only sees well with the heart. The essential [things] are invisible to the eye.”
One of Exupéry’s works, Wind, Sand and Stars, 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, but not because of Exupéry’s descriptions of exciting places and interesting people. Exupéry spends most of the book encouraging the reader to carefully consider his approach to life and those souls he will meet along the way. Above all else, Exupéry extols his readers to act heroically, to awaken the man within.
In typical French fashion, Exupéry illustrates his call to heroism in the negative, that is, by telling us what we ought not to be and how we ought not to act.
One passage, in which Exupéry describes a fellow traveler on a bus that he rode back and forth from the airport, stands out:
“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 (and rightly so, IMHO) with those who cut themselves off from big, uncomfortable issues and from asking difficult questions, especially about themselves.
What Exupéry was driving at, as Steven Pressfield wrote in the War of Art, is that our first obligation to ourselves is to ask (and answer) the most uncomfortable of questions: “Who am I?” Once we honestly answer this question, we must ask, “I am doing what I am.., or not?” Am I a writer who doesn’t write? Am I the painter who doesn’t paint? The entrepreneur who never starts a new venture?
To answer these questions honestly takes courage. To act on the answers is heroic. To become the hero in us, we must push back against the fear and resistance we have to changing ourselves,and then act, just act.
JG