The Little Prince and Important Conversations

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is my favorite book. My mother introduced me to it in high school and I was fairly skeptical (as any high schooler is with their parents). She told me that she thought I would like it and I should just give it a try. That’s exactly what she told me about piano lessons when I was in 3rd grade and that was a complete debacle which included me crying every Tuesday night about how I didn’t practice enough for lessons on Wednesday and that I was afraid that my teacher would yell at me. I do want to point out that my teacher did yell at me. Every week she yelled at me. Actually, I am sure that if I had practiced every single waking minute, she still would have yelled at me. She was a pretty awful teacher and I quit piano after a year. So all of this is to say that whenever I hear suggestions from my mother, I am cynical. With all that baggage floating around in my head, for some reason, I decided to give The Little Prince a try. I loved it. I loved the characters, the lessons, the illustrations (yep, there are pictures) and the meaning behind each page of the book. I snagged my mother’s copy of it and never gave it back (well, that’s because I lost it when I was a freshman in college… but I wouldn’t have given it back. Now I have a new shiny one that my mother gave me… she also purchased another one for herself). I have read the book at least once a year since it was introduced to me. There’s never a specific time of year that I feel like I need to read it, it’s more of a certain mood that I am feeling. I usually pull out the book when I need to take a break and get some perspective.


All of this explanation on the book and why I love it is not a prelude to a book report or anything, it’s more to give you some background on why I was reading it this week. I was reading it because I wanted to give myself some perspective as well as to provide me a little taste of home (it’s the holidays afterall, right?). I decided that I wanted to write something about this book or about how I feel around reading this book or something like that. What I’ve come up is a lot less insightful and more of a show and tell. I’m cool with that. I feel like most of the stuff I throw on here isn’t so much as insightful as it is just me rambling (unless you think my love for Marcel the Shell is insightful).

I wanted to share my absolute favorite part of the book. It happens within the first couple pages, so if you ever just want to pick up the book, read a page or two. You won’t be disappointed. Here’s the page that resonates with me.

After this page, the author goes on to talk about how adults don’t understand anything and that it is exhausting for children to have to keep explaining things to them. He says:

“Whenever I encounter a grown-up who seemed to me at all enlightened, I would experiment on him with my drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I wanted to see if he really understood anything. But he would always answer, “That’s a hat.” Then I wouldn’t talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars. I would put myself on his level and talk about bridge and golf and neckties. And my grown-up was glad to know I was such a reasonable person."

These pages and words resonate with me. It makes me ponder how I address people and make judgments based on who I think they are. I’m not carrying around a picture of a boa constrictor eating an elephant, but I certainly decide who is enlightened enough to have the important conversations. Well, the important conversations to me. As explained in the book, people feel like talking about work, politics, sports, and technology. They see these conversations as enlightened and educated. I don’t really see those as the significant conversations, but I’m willing to have them with those that I think deserve them.

I’m not inclined to share what I consider important conversations with those that can’t understand them or handle them. To me, an important conversation involves your dreams, hopes, fears and so much more. I want to talk about how the music you listen to moves your soul. I want to have conversations about the close relationship of your grandparents and how that impacted your life. I want to talk about the feeling you get from your pen strokes touching the paper as you write your first novel. Or the spark you felt in your heart after strumming an original song on the guitar. Please tell me about the childish joy you get from rolling up a snowball and preparing to find a target. Let’s talk about the things that we cannot even fathom… are there really spiders the size of my head in the amazon? What does it feel like to walk on the moon? What would it feel like to paint a masterpiece? All of these things seem like a real conversation to me. In the grand scheme of things, these are what I find important, but sometimes, I need The Little Prince to remind me.

Listening to Simon & Garfunkel.