My Favorite Book: The Little Prince

My favorite book is The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

If you have read it, this short piece will make sense. If you haven’t, I’d rather you read it than anything I’ve written–time is fleeting.

The book’s narrator, a pilot, crashes in the Sahara Desert and meets another interloper there–a diminutive alien, a little prince.

The prince tells stories of his home world and recounts his visits to six planets. Each planet is home to a cartoonish depiction of an archetypical character: a king, a conceited man, an alcoholic, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer.

The king is obsessed with power; the conceited man is vain; the alcoholic is addicted; the businessman is greedy; the lamplighter is an obedient bureaucrat; and the geographer records the position of mountains without visiting them. For me, each represents some undesirable element of adulthood, and the prince is repulsed by all.

I identify strongly with the prince. In my life, I have visited many planets and been confused by the way of life on each. I am not afraid to grow old or to die. Instead, I am afraid to lose the ability to see a hat as an elephant within a boa constrictor:

As I age, I collect wisdom: an understanding (and uncertainty) about the world. But wisdom seems to have a cost.

Wise people understand things as they are. But sometimes, wisdom comes at the expense of creativity, the ability to imagine life otherwise.

Is it possible to acquire the former without losing the latter? I am not sure, but I hope to find out.