The Little Prince, And The Power We Lose In Adulthood
The cardinal question that every child asks themself is: what will happen when I grow up? Adults all around us create this image of experiencing an irreplaceable change when we would turn eighteen (‘coming of age’, as some would say) and as children, we would wonder and wonder. What would truly change when we grow older? What would we gain and what would we lose? As we inch closer to adulthood, we see the disillusionment that adults have with the world, and we promise ourselves to never look at this universe with such a simplistic lens. But again, weren’t the adults around us, first children? Weren’t they like us, pinning hopes on this lovely, beautiful world we live in? What, then, happened to turn adults into such people who wouldn’t even trust a neighbour that has spent their entire lives smiling politely at them?
Perhaps these are the questions Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 novella ‘The Little Prince’ (originally written as ‘Le Petit Prince’ in French) seeks to answer. The story follows a narrator whose plane crashes into a desert. He subsequently meets the Little Prince, who came to Earth from a planet that is only enough to accommodate only him and a flower. The story then describes all his travels to different planets, and the love for the rose on his planet, and ultimately ends in his departure back to his planet, and a change in the narrator, who ends his story with ‘send me word that he has returned.’
“Grown-ups find it hard to understand anything on their own, and it is tiring for children to always have to explain things to them. […] Children need to be very patient with grown-ups.”
From the get-go, we see the kind of uneasy relationship both the narrator and the Prince have with adults. It’s almost a reversal of hierarchies: the author urges children to understand the grown-ups, who go about judging people by not their natures but their wealth, their salaries (‘the grown-ups — they seem to love numbers. They never say ‘what does his voice sound like? What games does he love the best? Instead they ask: ‘how old is he? How many brothers has he? Does his father make much money? From these numbers alone they think they have learned everything about him.’). The novella begins with a memory that the narrator has, when the adults stopped him from painting completely after they found out he could only draw a boa constrictor with an elephant inside. And he didn’t even persuade his parents/guardians to allow him to paint more and just took the decision on stride.
However, things changed when he meets the Little Prince, he now an adult who crashed his plane.
“My friend (the Little Prince) never gave me any explanations. He thought, perhaps, that I was like him. But, alas, I cannot see sheep through the walls of boxes. Maybe I am a bit like the grown-ups. Maybe I have grown old.”
When the author meets the Prince, he is a quintessential adult: one who has lived his life in accordance to what was expected of him. He never was one who would question convention, never the one to see things in a perspective different from what he was taught (the Prince remarking at the narrator’s irritation: ‘you sound exactly like the grown-ups!’). But the arrival, and the friendship between him and the Prince changed something in him. On their first meeting, the Prince asked him to draw a sheep for his planet that could eat the ‘deadly’ baobabs. As he asks the author to draw more and more, and presents him questions about the planet to know more; the narrator finds himself wanting to do better. Even when he dismisses the questions of the Prince in order to repair his engine, he feels ashamed of the fact. At the end of the story, the narrator is a completely changed person: he becomes a complete person who is capable of seeing the world for more than numbers, elements, and work. As he says:
“I love listening to the stars at night. It’s like listening to five hundred million little bells.”
“I know of a planet where there’s a red-faced man. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked upon a star. He has never loved anyone. He has done nothing else but sums. And he repeats to himself daily, just like you: ‘I am busy with something important!’ And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man, he is a balloon!”
But of course, most of the book is dedicated to the adventures of the Prince, who travels all over the universe. But first, he plants a rose in his planet, a flower so incomprehensibly beautiful to him that he falls in love with it. Like when the Rose blooms, the Little Prince ‘was full of admiration: oh! How beautiful you are!’ He is often described as being in love with all the nature around him, a child who watches forty-three sunsets because the days are small in his tiny planet. But for him, the Rose becomes his one true love and soulmate, whose scarring words are of no effect, for he realizes he loves her regardless of it all (‘Flowers are incomprehensible! Or maybe I wasn’t old enough to know how to love her.’). Therefore, he leaves his planet and journeys to others in order to know and with that, love his Rose better than ever, understand her.
“People have no time to understand anything anymore. They buy things readymade at the shops. But there is no store where you can buy friendship, and so, people have no friends anymore.”
In a way, this is the conclusion the Little Prince comes across through his travels. In all the planets, he’s confronted by different kinds of adults (a king, a drunkard, a businessman, a ferryman, and a geographer), yet all of them had one thing in common — they lacked depth. They were just machines working at either what they were asked to do despite consequences for them (the ferryman was unable to sleep because the planet rotated faster with 400 sunsets a day) or were obsessed with the possession of wealth (the businessman, who wanted to own the stars because ‘it makes me rich’). Even the geographer, who to the Little Prince, looked like he could know and have the thirst to explore the world, does not even know how the mountains look like. He redirects the Prince to Earth, where everything changes.
But the Little Prince, as he approaches and explores the Earth without people, forgets what makes him who he is: he cannot bear to hold anything close to him anymore. He regards the world with a disillusionment in almost all the scenes he comes across: from the deserts to the mountains. The heightening of this emotion comes when he visits a field full of flowers of the same species as his Rose; he looks at the field and is filled with a sense of defeat as he realizes that the flower he left behind and pined for is not at all unique. The magic in everything he sees and feels is gone, and is replaced by this feeling that nothing he experiences is unique to him and him alone. Everyone experiences, sees, and feels the same and so he is not one of a kind. It doesn’t make him truly ‘a prince.’ He remarks:
“‘I thought that I was lucky,’ the Little Prince said to himself, ‘that I had a flower so unique. But all I had was a common rose. A common rose and three small volcanoes, of which one might be extinct. That doesn’t really make me a prince.’ And he lay down on the grass and cried.”
“‘It is something no one really thinks about,’ said the fox. ‘It means to make a connection.’ ‘Make a connection?’ ‘Correct’, said the fox.”
On his journey, he meets a fox and with unhappy eyes, asks him to play with unhappiness carved into his face. When the fox refuses, the Prince is asked to ‘tame’ him, which meant ‘to make a connection’. Because, as the fox says, ‘if you were to tame me, then we would need each other. You would be unique to me, and I to you.’ From that point on, the fox and him spend what seems like an eternity together; they would play and in the process of that play, they build a love within themselves. And in the process of this, the Little Prince learns how to be himself again: to find beauty in the little actions that the fox does, and realizing that love is unique to him; how love, in whatever form, occurs is unique to him and him alone. He says, to the roses, ‘You are beautiful, but you are hollow […] I have listened to her (the Rose’s) complaining, grumbling, boasting, and even to her silence. Because she is my rose.’ And when he leaves the fox, it leads to perhaps the most heartbreaking line of them all.
“It is only through your heart that you can see clearly. The eyes do not see that which is most important.”
Cut to the Prince and the narrator in the desert. The previous lines summarize the difference between them clearly: the latter did not see the world, fit the world into the lens of the Prince. Yet, as the story moved on, the narrator began watching the Earth gently, in the way the Prince always has (‘Water is good for the heart, you know?’). The Little Prince teaches the author the most important skill to humankind: hope. He says, ‘what makes the desert so beautiful, is that somewhere in its folds lies a hidden well.’ He hopes like a child, like a small being who cannot view the environment that surrounds him as antagonistic. And so, the protagonist dreams and sees the world. As he holds the Little Prince’s body before his departure, he feels as if he is witnessing something incredible, and something so beyond the comprehension of a mind fed by the adults around him. Finally, he realizes as he holds the Little Prince and feels him lift off from his arms, he loves truly.
“‘People have their stars,’ he answered, ‘but they are not all the same. For travellers, stars are guides. For others, they are simply little lights in the sky. For scientists, they are trouble. For my businessman, they are wealth. But the stars are silent. You… you alone will have special stars.’”
BTS’ V, in his 2020 song ‘Inner Child’, sings ‘you just have to look at my galaxies / you just have to be showered by those stars / I will give my world to you’ and this fits the theme that connects the Little Prince: regaining a fascination with the world once again. The novella was published at the peak of the Second World War — known as the deadliest war in human history — and it carries a sense of disillusionment with the world. The Little Prince not only provides an escape from the worries of a post-World War Earth but also provides hope for the future. It helps us relearn what we lost: our innocence, and regain a love for this beautiful world that we live in. And it holds the hope that one day, we may be able to see the world for what it actually is: an amalgamation of humans and nature held together by unique connections binding humans and non-humans and plants in one interdependent cycle of life.
As the Little Prince says, we will have special stars together. We just need to learn how to recognize them.
