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 |  | The Little Prince
By Gentry Lee
SPACE.com columnist
posted: 12:28 pm ET
05 September 2000
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THE LITTLE PRINCE
I first read Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery in my sophomore French class at the university. Even though I was a typically self-absorbed adolescent, I immediately recognized the book as a gem, and read it with far more attention than I ordinarily gave to my school assignments. In the 40 years since that first exposure, I have returned to the world of the little prince at least a dozen times, gleaning some new and profound insight with each reading.
Illustrated with marvelous, simple watercolors drawn by the author, Le Petit Prince appears, on the surface, to be a book for children. The plot is straightforward. The complete story is told in less than a hundred pages. The vocabulary is easily accessible. I can attest to the fact that children do indeed adore the book, for on several occasions I have read it to one or more of my sons. But Le Petit Prince is definitely not just a children’s book. It is unbelievably rich in thoughts and ideas about who and what we human beings are, and maybe ought to be.
The story is told in the first person. The author, a pilot, describes an experience that occurred six years prior to the writing of the book. At that time, the author was forced to crash land in a remote section of the Sahara desert after having a problem with the motor on his airplane. Miles and miles away from anything even vaguely resembling civilization, the author recounts his complete astonishment upon encountering a small being, the size of a child, dressed in regal splendor. In the course of the book we learn that the charming little prince is from a tiny asteroid discovered by a Turkish astronomer, that he has visited many worlds and that his love for the sole flower on his home planet is infinite and unconditional. If we read the book carefully with both our hearts and our minds open, we learn many other things as well.
Love for numbers
One of the themes of Le Petit Prince is the contrast between the way that children and most adults interact with the world and with each other. Many of the comments the author makes in the text about the differences between children and adults suggest that children often grasp fundamental truths more readily than their older counterparts. The book is laced with memorable passages on this subject, my favorite of which begins with the statement "Les grandes personnes aiment les chiffres," roughly translated as "Adults have a passionate love for numbers."
"When you speak to adults about a new friend," the book continues after the statement about adults loving numbers (and please forgive me, all you French scholars in the world, for these are my own translations), "they never ask questions about really important attributes. Adults never say to you, ‘What is the sound of his voice? What are the games that he prefers? Does he collect butterflies?’ Instead they ask, ‘How old is he? How many brothers does he have? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father earn?’"
Ah, me. Recently I had a day that reminded me of the truth of the observations in Le Petit Prince. In the morning I was the guest speaker for a fourth-grade class just beginning the study of the solar system. My sixth son, Travis, had exuberantly informed his classmates and his teacher that his dad was an "expert on Mars" and I was therefore invited to tell his class "what Mars was all about." It would be an understatement to say that the nine year olds were eager to learn. When I was finished trying to encapsulate the essence of Mars in 30 minutes, I was peppered with wonderful questions. "What does Mars smell like?" and "Could the Martians maybe live underground now, near the water?" are two that I remember. There was not one question about whether we human beings should continue to explore Mars. No child asked how much it costs to send a spacecraft to the Red Planet. I remember glancing around the room as I departed and being delighted by the wide-eyed curiosity on the faces of more than half the students.
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That evening, after a plane flight, I participated in a prestigious public forum on the future of our national space program. In a short, prepared speech, I waxed lyrical about the marvels and mysteries of Mars, mentioning, among other items, the tantalizing photographs taken by Mars Global Surveyor that suggest the possibility of comparatively recent running water on the surface. Although I also candidly acknowledged the recent failures in our Mars exploration program, and admitted that we need to continue our thorough reexamination of our engineering practices and policies, the emphasis in my talk was definitely the excitement and wonder connected with the exploration of our planetary neighbor.
Hostile questions
During the long, interactive question-and-answer session that followed the forum, I was struck both by the hostile nature of many of the inquiries and comments, and the fact that none of the questioners seemed uplifted or even excited by the subject matter. Nobody asked what Mars smelled like, for example, or whether Martians might be living just under the surface. Numbers punctuated almost every question and I found myself quoting St. Exupery under my breath, with amusement, "Les grandes personnes aiment les chiffres".
One articulate member of the audience summarily dismissed my entire set of prepared comments as "the biased fluff of a lifelong technocrat" before demanding that the entire planetary exploration program be subjected to a rigorous "cost-benefit analysis." In his opinion, "only those missions with significant likelihood of positive return on investment in the near future," should be undertaken and approved by our government.
A colleague on the panel attempted to explain how technically demanding projects require the development of new technologies, which in turn benefit the society as a whole. The man in the audience then pointed out, correctly, that direct investment in those new technologies, without tying the activity to any particular space program, would be much more cost effective. While listening to this informed individual rattle off costs of various programs and his own calculated, modest benefits, I suddenly had an epiphany. In the middle of that forum I heard the voice of the little prince and saw one of the watercolors from the book in my mind’s eye.
During a brief pause in the soliloquy of the man at the microphone, I gently interrupted. "I’m sorry," I said, "the exploration of the planets is not about Teflon, or cost benefits, or return on investment. It is about the quest of a species to understand its origin and destiny, and to locate itself and its home planet in the grand scheme of things. Only by knowing the nature of the other planets can we truly comprehend what the Earth, and we as one of its occupants, are really all about."
The real return
I smiled. "The return on investment is in our hearts and minds," I continued. "To know that there is a sulfur-dioxide geyser on Io, a liquid-nitrogen crystal fountain on Triton and the possibility of liquid water close to the surface on Mars induces a resonance in the human spirit. We are thrilled. We experience a joy. That thrill and joy are not unlike what we feel when we hear a beautiful piece of music, witness a glorious sunset or feel love toward another person. To attempt to put a cost-benefit measure on such things is fatuous."
The man from the audience looked at me as if I was an alien. His brow furrowed. He shrugged. "I don’t understand the relevance of those comments," he then said. A few seconds later he was again cataloging the poor cost-benefit relationship of planetary missions.
While he was speaking, I glanced around the audience. There were no children in attendance. After all, this was a serious forum. I laughed to myself. The fourth grade students to whom I had spoken that morning understood what was essential about planetary exploration without even being told. As the man droned on, somewhere in my mind’s eye the little prince danced into view. He was smiling. "Adults never understand anything," the little prince said.
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