by Antoine De Saint-Exupery, 1939
This is an autobiography of the author of The Little Prince. He was a French pilot in the 1930’s and 1940’s, flying the mail from France to Africa and then in South America over the Andes. He writes about the dangers of flying – mountains, storms, sand, sometimes the planes themselves falling apart in mid-air. He crash-landed, hit a sand-dune in the dark in the Libyan desert. He and his mechanic survived and were rescued by a Bedouin in the nick of time, after about a week of rambling around in the desert with only a liter of water and half of an orange between them.
The last part of the book was about the Spanish Civil War. He was with soldiers and writes about the tragedy that war is. Very philosophical, but I agree with him.
Here’s when he and his mechanic, Prevot, are rescued after about a week in the desert. He describes the water and I imagine this is how we are all going to feel when we see Jesus face-to-face:
“The Arab looked at us without a word. He placed his hands up on our shoulders and we obeyed him: we stretched out upon the sand. Race, language, religion were forgotten. There was only this humble nomad with the hands of an archangel on our shoulders.
“Face to the sand, we waited. And when the water came, we drank like calves with our faces in the basin, and with a greediness which alarmed the Bedouin so that from time to time he pulled us back. But as soon as his hand fell away from us we plunged our faces anew into the water.
“Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses. By thy might, there return into us treasures that we had abandoned. By thy grace, there are released in us all the dried-up runnels of our heart. Of the riches that exist in the world, thou art the rarest and also the most delicate –thou so pure within the bowels of the earth! A man may die of thirst lying beside a magnesian spring. He may die within reach of a salt lake. He may die though he hold in his hand a jug of dew, if it be inhabited by evil salts. For thou, water, art a proud divinity, allowing no alteration, no foreignness in thy being. And the joy that thou spreadest is an infinitely simple joy.”
Then he writes:
“You, Bedouin of Libya who saved our lives, though you will dwell for ever in my memory yet I shall never be able to recapture your features. You are Humanity and your face comes into my mind simply as man incarnate. You, our beloved fellowman, did not know who we might be, and yet you recognized us without fail. And I, in my turn, shall recognize you in the faces of all mankind. You came towards me in an aureole of charity and magnanimity bearing the gift of water. All my friends and all my enemies marched towards me in your person. It did not seem to me that you were rescuing me: rather did it seem that you were forgiving me. And I felt I had no enemy left in all the world.”
He describes a beautiful, peaceful French city called Perpignan, near Spain and the Mediterranean, at the base of the Pyrenees, the last peaceful city before you entered the Spanish Civil War. This is 1936:
“I was flying solo, and as I looked down on Perpignan I was day-dreaming. I had spent six months there once while serving as test pilot at a near-by airdrome. When the day’s work was done I would drive into this town where every day was as peaceful as Sunday. I would sit in a wicker chair within sound of the cafe band, sip a glass of port, and look idly on at the provincial life of the place, reflecting that it was as innocent as a review of lead soldiers. These pretty girls, these carefree strollers, this pure sky. . . .
“But here came the Pyrenees. The last happy town was left behind.”
The last pages of the book, he is describing the poor Polish people in the second class cars of a train, in particular a beautiful little boy sleeping between his mother and father:
“I sat down face to face with one couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants. Forth from this sluggish scum had sprung this miracle of delight and grace.
“I bent over the smooth brow, over those mildly pouting lips, and I said to myself: This is a musician’s face. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what would not this child become?
“When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all the gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine. This little Mozart will love shoddy music in the stench of night dives. This little Mozart is condemned.
“I went back to my sleeping car. I said to myself: Their fate causes these people no suffering. It is not an impulse to charity that has upset me like this. I am not weeping over an eternally open wound. Those who carry the wound do not feel it. It is the human race and not the individual that is wounded here, is outraged here. I do not believe in pity. What torments me tonight is the gardener’s point of view. What torments me is not this poverty to which after all a man can accustom himself as easily as to sloth. Generations of Orientals live in filth and love it. What torments me is not the humps nor hollows nor the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these men, of Mozart murdered.
“Only the Spirit, if it breathe upon the clay, can create Man.”