Wind, Sand, & Stars

   Finally finished this book and it’s a keeper.   It is one I hope to read again and again.   And I don’t usually do that.    I’m giving it 5 stars.

It’s philosophy and beautiful prose.  And history.   And beautiful language.   Fascinating, isn’t it?  that even though Mr. de Saint-Exupery wrote it in French originally, that the translation into English translated so well?  (Translation acknowledgement / thank you to Lewis Galantiere)

He takes us into flight; we survive being sucked into the seas or hurled into mountain sides.   We travel the countrysides of France and Spain, into the bombed city of Madrid, over the snow-covered Andes, introduced to the mirages of the Libyan desert.   We die of thrist; we are rescued.   We are left to guard a crashed airplane with one gun and few bullets against possible marauding fanatics.   We fear not death.

And we explore life from amazing perspectives.   We ponder, we contemplate, we question, and we share.

“But if we are to succeed in grasping what is essential in man, we must put aside the passions that divide us and that, once they are accepted, sow in the wind a whole Koran of unassailable verities and fanaticisms.  Nothing is easier than to divide men into rightest and leftists, hunchbacks and straightbacks, fascists and democrats – and these distinctions will be perfectly just.  But truth, we know, is that which clarifies, not that which confuses.  Truth is the language that expresses universality.  Newton did not”discover” a law that lay hidden from man like the answer to a rebus.   He accomplished a creative operation.   He founded a human speech which could express at one and the same time the fall of an apple and the rising of the sun.  Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable.

If you love children’s books, you will recognize that this author also penned The Little Prince.  If I know The Little Prince, it is a vague recollection only.     Wind, Sand & Stars was written in 1939 before this kids book which was written in 1943.      It won the National Book Award and is listed as a Top Ten Adventure Book of All Time by National Geographic.   A few sexist and racist sentences which reflect the times stand out so glaringly in our now PC world and I’m not quite sure if worth mentioning.    While flying for his air squadron, Antoine de Saint-Exupery disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944 at the age of 44.    He also wrote Night Flight and Wartime Writings.