Weather Report: On Beauty

Post #5 The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

We have now entered December, as I continue with these weekly posts exploring the many facets of beauty, through the lens of the Resource List at the back of Weather Report. Here in the northern hemisphere we are moving towards the shortest day of the year - the sky here in Ireland during some recent dry days has had an almost pearl quality, the trees are now bare of leaves and birdsong continues to surprise me when I go out for a walk.

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The featured book from the Resource List this week is The Little Prince, by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, a small book of less than a hundred pages in total but one that has enchanted adults and children since it was first published in 1943.

It is a fable of sorts in which an adult meets a mysterious child-prince after crash-landing his plane in the Sahara Desert. The book opens with the (adult) narrator recounting his remembered frustration as an imaginative six year old as he attempted to communicate with adults who clearly had lost their imaginative capacities. His drawing of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant the adults can only see as a hat. He is discouraged and simply withdraws from being overtly imaginative and creative and grows to become a ‘sensible’ adult as is required. But, significantly, he has always kept his Drawing Number One, his creative capacity, in case he meets even one adult who understands and is receptive.

The very first thing asked of him by The Little Prince, his mysterious desert visitor, is to draw him a sheep, but each attempt is dismissed as ‘too sickly’, ‘too old’, not a sheep ‘a ram’, until the pilot finally draws a box, with the explanation that, “This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside.” To which the prince responded, “That is exactly the way I wanted it!” And thus they begin the gradual process of understanding themselves and each other.

In Weather Report, Day 31 & p. 68 in The Little Prince

On his journey and after many encounters, the little prince meets a fox, who helps the prince to understand what ‘taming’ means.

“… if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world… it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others.“ (De Saint-Exupéry, p. 64)

The instruction quoted in the illustration above, to go and ‘look again at the roses’, is an instruction to look closely, to pay attention and by doing so to discover how each rose is singular in its beauty, despite being perhaps one of a bed of hundreds such roses. The prince begins to review his dismal view of his own ‘common rose’ and realise that he had looked after it, tended to it and in the terms of what the fox is revealing to him, had tamed it. “Go and look again”, he is told.

In Weather Report, Day 83 & p. 68 The Little Prince

Because the tenderness, care and attachment that comes with ‘taming’ another brings with it the risk of loss and ensuing sadness, the fox assures the little prince that even though he will be sad when they are apart the colour of the wheat fields will bring to mind the colour of his little friend’s hair; “… you have hair that is the colour of gold”.

There will always something to hold on to, even at a time of separation, when the inner landscape is populated by beauty.

“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” (De Saint-Exupéry, p. 68)

In this wonderful fable both the little prince and the pilot must learn from each other and from the individuals met along the way, the rewards and the necessary costs of living an attentive and full life.

The Little Prince animation - narrated by Kenneth Brannagh