a teenager Who didn’t laugh and didn’t cry over the pages of “the Little Prince” with pictures of the author, that, I think, lost in childhood and adolescence something very important. And his adult soul is incomplete, it lacks this very important component. However, I’m subjective, because I on these pages and these pictures, laughed and cried. And I’m already hard to imagine my childhood without the boa constrictor swallowing the elephant and became like a hat, or without a box, which is just the perfect lamb, which I need.
seriously… Imagine what would happen weird. All texts Exupery, including “the Little Prince”, suddenly disappeared from the paper and electronic media. There would be only one single phrase: “You are forever responsible for those who tamed”. And its only here it would be sufficient that its author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery was written in eternity. It is almost gospel truth; no wonder “the Little Prince” on the number of translations into different languages of the world (301 if I am not mistaken) yields only one book – the Bible.
I would remind others of his great aphorisms. For example: “Love is not about staring at each other, it means looking together in one direction”. Or: “the Only luxury in the world – is the luxury of human communication”. And of course, “we all come from childhood”, which was to be some kind of banal obviousness, as “twice two is four” or “the Volga flows into the Caspian sea”.
To Exupery this was not commonplace. It became his destiny. When at the age of 12 the boy, the descendant of an ancient but impoverished family, the son of a Viscount, who worked as a modest insurance agent in Lyons, and died from a haemorrhage, when Antoine was 4 years old when this little French count first took to the air on the plane piloted by the famous pilot Gabriel Wroblewsky, his fate was decided. In fact, in the subsequent 32 years he could not get out of this state. Remained a child who lives between heaven and earth.
In a letter to his sweetheart, the granddaughter of the Russian Emperor Alexander II Natalie Paley, he wrote: “Cruel to see Paradise and then you lose it”. In another letter there is a striking self-awareness of despair, the words: “planet Ridiculous, ridiculous problem, ridiculous language. Maybe there is somewhere a star where you live simple.”
In these words the whole “Little Prince”, written in the same 1942, and letters to Paley. Star, “live simply”, this is where you can weed out the baobabs and warm Breakfast on active volcanoes. Where it is possible to be friends with rose and watch the sunset dozens of times a day. And, Yes, suffer from loneliness, but how sweet to suffer! How to know how to suffer children and adolescents with very developed spiritual substance, which techo in the physical substance. Yes, most people do outgrow it. Have Exupery has not passed. His language and clear to children and adolescents.
exupéry is one of the most famous pilots. He had a patent for the invention of some aircraft instruments. But at the same time, in the history of world aviation, it seems, was not the pilot, who in a relatively short professional life suffered a 15 (!) disasters. He never had to fly with his traumatic brain injury and broken bones. Certainly during the war he was not supposed to serve in distant air reconnaissance aircraft of the latest generation. Friends dissuaded him from this step, and age, and complexion, he’s already in aviarazvedchiki was not good. But he made sure to fly over Lyon – the place of his birth and childhood, where he and his brothers and sisters, “concluded a Union with lime-trees, cattle, and grasshoppers, with the songstress-frogs and rising in the sky the moon…” (From the memoirs of his sister Simone.)
the Price of this return to childhood was his mysterious death on July 31, 1944. Antoine de Saint-exupéry took off from the airfield at Borgo in Corsica on a reconnaissance flight from which he never returned. The question of his death is still open. Seems to have found the plane already at the beginning of the XXI century. In 1998 in the sea near Marseille one fisherman found his bracelet. an Elderly veteran of the “Luftwaffe” Horst Rippert publicly stated that he shot down the plane with Exupery and that he regrets it, because is a fan of his books. But on the remains of the aircraft found no trace of fire. Not found and the remains of the Saint-Exupery. He disappeared. As the little Prince. “But I know he went back to his planet, after all, when the day broke, I found in the sand of his body”.
And even if someday we find out about his death the real truth, we do not believe it. Because “all the stars laugh softly” and “bells cry.” Because “everything is mysterious and incomprehensible. You who also love the little Prince like me, it’s not all the same: the whole world becomes different because somewhere in an obscure corner of the universe to the lamb, whom we never saw, perhaps, ate unfamiliar to us rose… Look at the sky. And ask yourself if that rose or it’s gone? Perhaps the sheep ate it?.. And you’ll see, everything will be different… And no grown-up will understand how important this is!”
From a letter of Antoine de Saint-Exupery Natalie Paley: “I Beg you, love me when I get back.”
And this is the beginning of “the Little Prince”: “Adults never understand anything by themselves and it is tiresome for children to no end for him to explain and explain…”
