The Little Prince - A Children's Story for Adults

There's a reason the Little Prince opens with this image of an elephant. And yeah, this is an elephant. Or rather, it's an elephant after having been eaten by a snake. I'm not trying to trick you or show you that not everything you'll read in The Little Prince is as it seems. I'm being literal. This is an elephant. And if you can't see it, well then maybe this video isn't for you. Because if you think imagination is just an impediment to reaching the real, you'll think The Little Prince is just another fantastical tale for children. And it is far more than that. It's a story that's just as important, no, more important to read when you've grown up. As children, we don't need to be told to use our imaginations. We do it all day long. But it's when we are all grown up that we need that reminder. And that's what The Little Prince is. It's a story whose sole purpose is to make us forget the things adults once told us were very serious or important. And it replaces them with the love, life, and imagination that came so easily to us when we were kids. And it all starts with a crash somewhere in the Sahara Desert. This crash was a very personal experience for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of this marvelous tale. Mainly because it literally happened to him. And there's a lot that happens in the story that mirrors his own life, including characters like the rose and the fox. But he didn't write this story so we could understand Saint-Exupéry. He wrote it so we could all remember what we'd lost. His own brush with death reminded him what was truly important, the forgotten lessons he had left behind in his childhood. And he put them down to paper for the rest of us. So as we lie on death's door in the Sahara Desert, we come face to face with a golden haired boy about to share his incredible story. The Little Prince. With his first words, he asks, Draw me a sheep. He needs one to help eat the baobab sprouts that grow on his home planet, you see. But none of the sheep we give him will do until we draw him this box. He immediately sees that this is the perfect sheep for him and gratefully takes a piece of paper we've drawn it And if you only see it as a silly box, then maybe this video isn't for you. But in case you do need this story to be a metaphor of some kind, then this child from another world is the little princes and princesses we all once were. The dreams we used to cherish as things we would do one day, and the adventures we never had to leave our backyards to go on. All those bottled into this one figure. This little prince who left his planet to run away from his road. Before landing on earth, the little prince lived on his planet. Asteroid B612 to be precise. Now B612 was a tiny place to live, even for someone as small as the prince. Sunsets came much more often than here on earth, and if the prince did not manage the baobab sprouts, the entire planet would crumble beneath the weight of their roots. One day, out of nowhere, his rose appeared. First nothing but a sprout, but then she unfurled into this beautiful flower that took his breath away. He took care of her and she kept him company. And though they were too young to admit it to themselves, they fell in love with each other. But in her constant vain requests for more attention and more shelter from the elements, and his naive frustration as these requests become larger and more extravagant, they drive each other apart. The little prince escapes his planet by tethering himself to a flock of migrating wild birds. Upon reflection, he knew, as do we, that he should have been more understanding. Her vanity was how she tried to show her love without saying it, and he should have forgiven her, told her how he felt, and loved her for the rest of his days. But alas, he escaped. Another love story ended too soon because two people couldn't admit their feelings to each other. But his adventures had only just begun. The first planet the little prince came upon was another small asteroid. There, on the towering throne, sat a king. When the prince asked what the he replied, everything. The prince, feeling lonely, asked for a sunset, and the king said he would order one for him when the conditions were favorable. And as it turned out, they would be favorable just before nighttime that evening. And when the prince said he felt like sitting down, the king ordered him to sit down. And a few more wacky examples later, it became quite clear to the prince that the king didn't have the slightest amount of real power over anything at all. Much like every king and despot on earth who has claimed to be master of the universe, the king only really has power if others are fooled by him. He has no more or less power than anyone else. The Putins and the Trumps who demand to be worshipped are just everyday people like you or me. They're as lonely and as fragile as any one of us, and they only have the powers that we give them. Much like the little prince did with the king, all it takes to take that power away is to ignore their pompous posturing and leave them all alone on their thrones. When the little prince reaches the next planet, he meets a man whose first reaction on seeing another person is to demand applause and admiration. Not because he'd done anything worthy of note, but because didn't he simply look stunning in his fancy clothes? Wasn't the cost and luxury of his wardrobe something to be admired? The prince left without so much as a second glance. Obviously this brief but very effective encounter gives us a window to how hollow and empty the materialism that has gripped our society is. If you think your expensive Yeezys or dodging Gibana handbag are a status symbol to be proud of, well sorry, but this is about you. Those items, whatever their cost, give you no more worth than someone who shops from the bargain bin at Target. They're just empty things, and unlike experiences, relationships, and love, they have no real value at all. The next planet the little prince visits is an even shorter stop. There he meets a man who drinks to forget his shame, and his shame is the shame of drinking. It's a sad but almost too real depiction of how many of us self-medicate our way through life. In a world that forces us to grow up to replace love and imagination with money and optimization, it often feels better to drug ourselves than to truly feel what we've lost. Now we arrive to the most pernicious and vile of the planets visited by our little prince. Here we meet the businessman. He counts all the stars, not because they're beautiful or scientific interest, because they are worth money. He wants to lock them all up in a bank where he can own them forever. He'll drain the swamp of those shiny objects that sent lazy men to idle dreaming. The prince left hastily, but not before telling the businessman he could never own the stars, because the stars have no use for him. It's exactly because of the businessman's cold calculations the recent film adaptation chose to use him as their primary villain. He is the perfect grown-up, the antithesis of our inner child, and that makes him the bad guy in both the world of the little prince and in our world. He believes that anything anyone does should be a quantifiable step in a quest for more money. Or, as he says, he's a very serious man who doesn't have time for wasteful things like love and imagination. No wonder, no joy, just money. The prince's next stop was the planet of the lamplighter. Here, the poor fellow is stuck in a terrible loop. Where he used to have a normal day between lightings, he now has to light and extinguish his lamp every few minutes because the rotation of his planet has sped up. This everyday man stuck in outdated processes that cause him great pain and inconvenience is a clear reflection of any number of our modern practices, whether that's the nine-to-five forced on most everyone or the hoops we all have to jump through in highly bureaucratic systems. The prince pitied the poor man, but could do nothing to help and had to leave. Next up, the little prince encountered the planet of the geographer. He studied geography, but he never left his desk to see the world. And why would he? It's an explorer's job to see the world. He is just here to write down what the explorer sees when he gets back. That's what a geographer does, and he'll stay right where he is, thank you very much. This is a none too veiled parody of any system that tries to box society's people into neat little roles we should all fit into. Whether it's corporate or communist, the geographer's dedicated conformity to his role is seen as ridiculous by both the little prince and the reader. So we, in turn, must ask ourselves, if it's so ridiculous, then why do we allow it to happen to ourselves over and over again? Finally, the little prince arrived on Earth. But what he saw brought him to his knees. A wall of roses, hundreds of them. He thought his rose was unique in the whole world, but here there were more than he could count. How could his rose be special when she was so common? While wondering in sadness at this idea, the prince came across the fox. To cheer himself up, he asked it if it wanted to play, but the fox replied that to play, it must first be tamed. It also warned him that if they tamed each other, they would both need each other. The prince paid no heed to this, and he and the fox tamed each other, and they became great friends. Until the day the prince realized he had to leave to return home, and the pain of saying goodbye hurt him terribly. It hurt so much, he wondered what the point of their friendship was at all. Return to the roses, said the fox, then you will understand. The prince did as he was told, and he did understand. The roses were not so similar to his after all. He did not water them, he didn't protect them from the wind or listen to their stories. His rose was unique in the world precisely because they were each other's. And so he returned to the fox, who was unique in the world filled with thousands of other foxes. That was the point of it all. Or as the fox put it as the prince departed, it is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye. What's most important in any of our lives isn't the amount of money we accrue or how many things we own. What's most important is listening to our hearts and letting our love and imagination take us to where we truly need to go. In doing so, we will always find home. The prince's way back home was somehow more unconventional than the flock of birds he used to leave. After meeting the pilot in the Sahara desert, the prince set out to meet the snake with his new grown-up friend in tow. The snake, or as you and I know him, Death, is the little prince's ultimate rejection of this world we call our reality. As he put it, I will look dead and it won't be true. Because he knew that what was truly essential was invisible. He knew his body was just a shell, one that could be replaced. And so in a literal flash, his body fell to the ground. And when the pilot returned to the site a bit later, the body was gone. And he knew the prince had returned to his rose. Of course, this part of the story isn't here to encourage mass suicide, but like I said earlier, as much as we can interpret its events, the book's message isn't one of metaphors or direct allegory. It's one of imagination. And here it's asking us to imagine, in the same way the pilot had to imagine, that the little prince is alright after all. He could just be dead, but listen to your heart, and you'll know that's not true. Who knows how or why, but he is back with his rose. The Little Prince is the ultimate children's story for adults. Not only does it exist as a parody of so much of the reality we're told to accept as we grow up, it begs of many of us to use a tool we so often forget we have. Our imagination. Our modern societies try to force themselves upon us, imposing order, quantification, optimisation. They train you to be just a number, and not only that, to be the most efficient little number you can possibly be. They try to replace the pure heart with a twisted one. We endlessly search for happiness we can see with our eyes, glorifying tales of greed and excess. But the little prince awakens in us, if only for a few moments, our inner child, and we can see clearly again. And it's when we see with our hearts, when we allow ourselves to imagine, to wonder, and to love, that we can be children even when we're grown up. That's the gift the book will pass on from generation to generation. Because we can all do with being a little less grown up.