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the little prince

I don't have much in the way of rules, only that the book must have been written in English and I won't include more than one book per author. I'm prioritizing (a) books that are highly influential on later authors and (b) books that I've gotten the most shit for not having read and (c) books that seem to align with my interests.

— "reading (modern) classics" (emphasis added)

Well, the very first thing I did was break one of my very own rules that no one made me set for a project no one made me do.[1] To be fair, the reason I made that rule was mostly a problem of scope: there are very many works that could be called classics in English alone and it was an obvious way to whittle what could be a truly gargantuan list down to a more manageable size; this is the same reason I was only including one book per author. It was also partially a bulwark against what I do most of the time when I feel the urge to dig into something weighty, which is read (mostly verse)[2] things translated into English from Greek or Latin.

Anyway, so obviously I weighed all of that and set well-considered rules for myself and then immediately ignored them. Such is life.

I'd never read The Little Prince, but for some reason,[3] yesterday it really struck me that I hadn't and that doing so probably wouldn't be hard. It wasn't—the whole thing was under a hundred pages, and I was able to acquire it on Libby via my library almost as soon as I had the thought.

I loved this book from the dedication page, and loved it more for its translator's note. I had already seen many of the highlights of the main text via the sort of cultural osmosis that one might expect from so popular and well-respected a work; the story of the Little Prince and his tamed fox was especially familiar. But still, the effect of the piece as a whole was striking, especially within the framing of the pilot-narrator's perspective.

It must also be said that the context of this book's production stayed in my awareness the entire time I was reading it.[4] It was a challenge not to over-identify the narrator with Saint-Exupéry,[5] and even more of a challenge not to feel that the narrator himself was doomed, simply because I knew what had happened to his creator.

In the end, I don't know that I'd consider this a children's book. It's short, for sure, and illustrated, but despite its format, it felt more like a book featuring a child than a book for a child, simply because of the specter that, in my mind, haunts the story: suicide.

Now, here I'm going to take a bit of a swerve to be somewhat more of a Trekkie than I tend to be in non-fandom spaces (this is related, I promise) because there's a passage from a Star Trek fanfic that comes to mind:

He has never read anything like it. He wishes he had never read it at all. He would wish to erase it, and whatever experience had inspired it, from all of time and existence.

—Branwyn, K'diwa, chapt. 2[6]

This quote gets at a really significant point that I've never been able to illustrate better: sometimes you encounter a text and you realize Oh, this was made by someone who gets it, whatever it may be in a given circumstance.[7] In the case of The Little Prince, it is a sort of deadly hopelessness that I associate with severe clinical depression.

There have been times in my life when I have been so profoundly depressed I started hallucinating.[8] I've been suicidal on and off since I was ten; it's currently off, but I assume it'll be on again at some point. I am, at this point, very familiar with the sort of things you tell yourself when you're fighting for your life against your own mind. They look a lot like this book, and if I cannot imagine reading it with a child, it's only because I don't think I could sit with that specter and a kid in the same room. Just the idea makes me cringe.

I don't mean to suggest that the book isn't lovely, and loving, and hopeful, even—it is. It's all those things, and I enjoyed it immensely. It's only that it strikes me as a rather hard-won sort of hope, which can be a kind of tragedy in itself.

  1. If you've seen the notes on my sources page, you'll know that I did pretty much the exact same thing over there. One might call it a pattern.^
  2. I should have been more explicit in my original post, but "no poetry collections" was another one of my rules for my list. I've read...honestly, probably most of the non-epic poems that comprise the English verse canon by any definition I can imagine. My parents are both huge poetry freaks (a wild thing to be saying about two economics professors, but true nonetheless) and I grew up surrounded by the stuff. I threw Paradise Lost on the list because I've attempted it a handful of times and never gotten terribly far, but shorter verse (and, honestly, verse in general) wasn't really the area where I was feeling inadequate.^
  3. Somehow, even though that was yesterday, I've already forgotten what, precisely, it was. A Tumblr post, perhaps? It was probably a Tumblr post.^
  4. For those unfamiliar with it: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published The Little Prince in New York in 1943 (his work was already banned by the Nazi-backed Vichy government in his mother country, France). In 1944, while flying a reconissance mission for the Free French Air Force, his plane disappeared.^
  5. It is worth noting that Saint-Exupéry did crash in the Libyan Desert in 1935, though he was not alone and was only stranded for four days rather than eight.^
  6. The text I quote is from the first published version of the story, which I have downloaded to my computer (my file dates to June 30, 2021). This passage has since been edited by the author in rewrites.^
  7. For the record, K'diwa is one of these texts, with the "it" it gets being something big and complex and emotional about the relationship between authors and readers and texts and trauma. It is a really interesting work on a metatextual level, and it sucks that I'm generally too much of a coward to recommend it to anyone who's not already deep into Star Trek fandom on account of the fact that, in addition to being a story about stories, it's also about a gay romance between Kirk and Spock.^
  8. Psychosis is a lesser-known and profoundly unnerving symptom that you sometimes get when you have major depressive disorder. Of the many unpleasant things my brain has done to me, I think it might have been the least enjoyable.^