The concluding chapter is a brief lament over what I would call the failure of mankind to live up to its promise. I’ll let Saint-Exupéry have the final word in my series of posts:
To come to man’s estate it is not necessary to get oneself killed around Madrid, or to fly mail planes, or to struggle wearily in the snows out of respect for the dignity of life. The man who can see the miraculous in a poem, who can take pure joy from music, who can break his bread with comrades, opens his window to the same refreshing wind off the sea. He too learns a language of men.
But too many men are left unawakened.
“Where is man’s truth to be found?”
Because it is man and not flying that concerns me most, I shall close this book with the story of man’s gropings toward self-fulfilment as I witnessed them in the early months of the civil war in Spain. One year after crashing in the desert I made a tour of the Catalan front in order to learn what happens to man when the scaffolding of his traditions suddenly collapses. To Madrid I went for an answer to the question: how does it happen that men are sometimes willing to die?
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Chapter 8 rivals – no, it surpasses – the drama of survival that Jack London portrayed in “To Build a Fire.” Perhaps I think the drama here is greater because it isn’t fiction. Saint-Exupéry and Prevót crash in the Libyan desert and struggle for survival without water for several days. It’s only by some gracious concidences that they were not lost forever.
At one point Saint-Exupéry describes his thoughts as he walks toward a mirage, fully aware (at one level) of what he is doing. As I read it a parallel came into my mind: he could just as easily have been describing the way we pursue false gods, anything other than God that we think will satisfy us with that final and ultimate satisfaction: (more…)
Chapter 7 captivates me because in it Saint-Exupéry describes several encounters between the Europeans and African Muslims on the western edge of the Sahara. It also includes some fine reflections on life in the desert, which I can appreciate because I lived eight years in the Chihuahua desert in southern New Mexico.
Saint-Exupéry says that in order to try to maintain a peaceful existence with the moorish tribes in the area, they sometimes took a few of them for a little spin in their planes – and they even took three of them to Paris. Hearing the way they reported on their trip to their friends when they returned is revealing. I’ll just record one comment that especially caught my attention:
“In Paris,” they said, “you walk through a crowd of a thousand people. You stare at them. And nobody carries a rifle!”
That tells you something about the life that these men lived. And if you pause for a minute, perhaps you will appreciate more the kind of life you live….
The final story of the chapter is about a slave that Saint-Exupéry buys in order to set him free. It’s an interesting reflection on what the meaning of freedom is. Sorry I don’t have much to say about it. i wish you would read it so we could sit and talk about it.
Here is a chapter with a charm very different from that of any other in the book.
By some “minor mishap” Saint-Exupéry is forced to land in a field in Argentina. An old Ford carries him to a mysterious old house where he enters, unexpectedly, into a fairy tale. The house as he describes it has a splendid personality – old, with traps and treasures everywhere. And there are two daughters who are as mysterious as the house. At dinner the girls are seated across from the pilot, and he tells this story:
I firmly expected that these alert young girls would employ all their critical faculty, all their shrewdness, in a swift, secret, and irrevocable judgment upon the male who sat opposite them. (more…)
I found little in this chapter to comfort me. Writers are like that, you know: they can use their magic for good or ill. They can spin essays and poems and books that make you want to sing – or they can, seemingly without malice, weave a mortal sentence and coldly thrust it through your heart.
Consider, if you dare, these innocent paragraphs. But be careful: they lead to a dark place:
In a world in which life so perfectly responds to life, where flowers mingle with flowers in the wind’s eye, where the swan is the familiar of all swans, man alone builds his isolation. What a space between men their spiritual natures create! A girl’s reverie isolates her from me, and how shall I enter into it? What can one know of a girl who passes, walking with slow steps homeward, eyes lowered, smiling to herself, filled with adorable inventions and with fables? Out of the thoughts, the voice, the silences of a lover, she can form an empire, and thereafter she sees in all the world but him a people of barbarians. More surely than if she were on another planet, I feel her to be locked up in her language, in her secret, in her habits, in the singing echoes of her memory. Born yesterday of the volcanoes, of greenswards, of brine of the sea, she walks here already half divine. (more…)
It is almost impossible to write about chapter four without sounding silly – but that has never stopped me before, so here goes….
Saint-Exupéry begins by letting us know how difficult it will be for him to convey to us the experience he is about to describe:
Every airline pilot has flown through tornadoes, has returned out of them to the fold – to the little restaurant in Toulouse where we sat in peace under the watchful eye of the waitress – and there recognising his powerlessness to convey what he has been through, has given up the idea of describing hell. His descriptions, his gestures, his big words would have made the rest of us smile as if we were listening to a little boy bragging. And necessarily so. The cyclone of which I am about to speak was, physically, much the most brutal and overwhelming experience I ever underwent; and yet beyond a certain pount I do not know how to convey its violence except by piling one adjective on another, so that in the end I should convey no impression at all – unless perhaps that of an embarrassing taste for exaggeration.
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We live in the age of the computer, and I couldn't help thinking of the Internet in particular as I mused on his musings. Then he said this:
The central struggle of men has ever been to understand one another, to join together for the common weal. And it is this very thing that the machine helps them do!
It seems to me that the Internet in particular answers this purpose – we have never drawn closer than now, never been more able to join together for the common weal. You and I have at our disposal the collective insights and experience of millions of our fellow human beings, and we can share it all instantly. Thirty years ago if some odd contraption in your house or car broke, you might have taken days to track down someone who could fix it. But now you just describe the problem in a few keywords to Google, and he shows you the original owner’s manual, or some other owner’s description of how he fixed the xact same problem you had. And that other owner lives on another continent.
Yes, there are still rotten people in the world who abuse the Internet and dump their garbage on us from time to time. But that defect is in fallen human nature. The invention itself, the machine itself, is glorious.
And it makes us wonder: what next? Is the Internet as close as machines can pull the human race, or is there something more?
In the second half of the chapter Saint-Exupéry tells a story of the courage of Guillaumet. Guillaumet is forced by a snow storm to crash-land high in the Andes. He take shelter under his plane for two days till the storm passes. Then he begins his long walk out.
He suffers terribly in the cold. Every few hours he must stop to cut his shoes back further to make room for his swelling feet. He begins to lose his memory, and at each place he stops he forgets something vital: a glove, his watch, his compass. He is ready to die. But one thought drives him forward: if his body is not found, he would not be declared legally dead for four years, and his wife would suffer. So he walks five days and nights, and makes it home. (more…)
Having described to us this new craft of the pilot, Saint-Exupéry now introduces us to the “new breed of men” that were cast for it. And he has something to say about the relationships that develop:
Men travel side by side for years, each locked up in his own silence or exchanging those words which carry no freight—till danger comes. Then they stand shoulder to shoulder. They discover that they belong to the same family. They wax and bloom in the recognition of fellow beings. They look at one another and smile. They are like the prisoner set free who marvels at the immensity of the sea.
Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations. Our sordid interests imprison us within their walls. Only a comrade can grasp us by the hand and haul us free.
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