Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince changed how I viewed the world. It seems startling that such a naïve-looking children’s novel could have such a profound effect on my life, but rest assured that the themes this story professes are anything but juvenile.
The Little Prince tells the story of an aviator whose plane crashes in the desert. While he is attempting to repair it, a child, the little prince, emerges from the desert. From there, the story turns into a narrative of the little prince’s life: a life full of love, maturity, and adventure.
Saint-Exupery tells the story as an adult reflecting on an experience that changed him. Saint-Exupery himself isn’t too fond of grown-ups. He thinks they focus on being “serious” and are obsessed with numbers. When the little prince is traveling to earth, he encounters several different adults on different planets. One of them is a very vain man, who wears a hat just so he can tip it when people clap for him. Another is a business man who counts all the stars, because he owns them. When the little prince asks him what good it is to own the stars, the business man says that it did him “the good of being rich,” and the good of being rich was that “it lets [him] buy other stars.” This type of circular argument is common in the discussions the little prince has with the adults. The adults’ flimsy justifications reveal how meaningless the work they do is, and how what they view as essential is just the opposite.
Because many adults focus only on what they can see, they often miss out on what’s important. One of my favorite quotes from the book is “one sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” The real problem with adults is not that they’ve grown up, but that they have forgotten. After reading The Little Prince, I realized that I had forgotten. I forgot about the things that were important. I was focusing only on things that seemed productive academically, instead of also devoting time to things my eyes couldn’t see: hope, faith, and love.
Love is also a topic that the novel explores. The little prince was in love with a rose on his home planet. He thought that she was the only flower of her kind in the entire universe. However, on earth he discovers hundreds of roses in a patch, so he becomes distraught. Later he has an epiphany. He tells the other roses: “‘You’re lovely but you’re empty. One couldn’t die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I watered…since she’s the one I listened to…since she’s my rose.’” The little prince understands that even though his rose may look the same as others, since he has spent time on the rose, his is immeasurably different than all the others. Love does not receive its value solely from its uniqueness: it receives it from the time and effort that one pours into it. The little prince says later, “People where you live grow five thousand roses in one garden…yet they don’t find what they’re looking for…and yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose…” Though he his young, the little prince understands that commitment comes before love, and things you have spent time on are immensely more valuable. Many beautiful roses are not worth more than one rose, if one has spent time on that one rose. People plant rose after rose trying to find love, without recognizing they need but one rose: a rose that they have watered.
Overall, The Little Prince taught me many valuable life lessons. It reminded me not to only focus on what I can see, because I will miss out on what’s truly essential. It also revealed to me the value that commitment places on those you love. Both themes apply to faith. I can’t expect to further my relationship with Christ without time and effort, something I have trouble dedicating to things that society deems as inessential. Society values the object itself, not the time one puts into it. That is why many people plant many roses, as the little prince described. But as the little prince’s fox says, “the only things you learn are the things you tame.”
