All grown-ups were children once – although few of them remember it.
The Little Prince is a book I’ve had since I was a small boy. I remember my mum reading it to me when I was maybe six or seven years old, over about a week, before bed every night. I particularly remember the couple of days where we were at the point in the story where the prince is travelling to various small planets, the imagery of it has stuck with me my whole life. I’m not the only one either, I’ve seen it show up in all kinds of interesting places. For example, there’s a company in this country called British Gas (natural gas in this country used to be nationalised, hence the uninspired name) and they had an advertising campaign that ran for years which blatantly ripped off that whole visual concept. If you’re interested just look up “british gas planet home” on youtube, planet home was the name of the initiative. I have to admit some of these ads were really well put together, even if the entire thing is incredibly manipulative as most advertising is.
Anyway, as I was saying this planet hopping part of the book is incredibly memorable and comforting, the idea of us all having our own little planet like the Prince does really tugs at a lot of the feelings I’ve talked about before. That we might all have our own little world to escape to. The rest of the book I have to say however, I remembered far less well when coming back to read it again recently. It all came back to me as I read through it (it’s a very short novella, you can finish it all in an evening) of course, but I was surprised by how much I was being reminded of. Only two things had really stayed with me, the planet hopping section and the personality of the titular character. In a sense I’ve been trying to emulate this character my entire life, since before I read the book myself at least but maybe that time it was read to me as a little boy impacted me more than I consciously realise.
Now it’s not like I woke up one morning and decided to try and method act as him, rather I’ve always admired the various characteristics that make this character and have tried to be like that myself. I didn’t even have the actual character of the little prince himself in my mind while doing this most of the time, it was actually only in re-reading the book just over a month ago that I really noticed the connection. Somehow there’s been this disconnect, where on the one hand I’ve had this personal conception of the character in my mind and always admired him, and on the other this person I would like to be, and yet I didn’t see the clear parallels. I didn’t see that the archetype that the prince represents, is the same one that I have (again, not entirely deliberately) tried to model myself on as I’ve grown up. Now I don’t even find myself trying, at this point in life (I’m 22) I have for the most part simply become this type.
When you’re growing up, there are all these different things pulling you in various directions. Competing impulses, who you spend time with and how you should respond to various circumstances for example. The choices you make during this period of time, will essentially define the kind of person you’ll be as an adult, at least in my opinion. I’ve talked before for example about how I was always kind of fascinated with lonely figures in fiction even when I was quite young, and hadn’t ever really experienced loneliness yet, and always saw something of myself in them. I think what I said in one post was that I could kind of sense that even though the circumstances hadn’t allowed for it yet, those kind of people were the most like me and I would end up like them. Again, perhaps this was even started when I had this book read to me all those years ago. I won’t ever be able to know if this is the case, but it would make a lot of sense.
The little prince is one of those characters, very possibly one of the first I encountered in fiction, he lives alone on his planet for who knows how long until the rose arrives. Sitting up there in his home in the sky, you can’t help but think of this golden haired young boy as a divine figure. The parallels with Apollo are certainly hard to miss. Because of this lonely existence of his, there’s this melancholy in everything he says and does that you can’t miss. I definitely have that now, and in fact it’s probably one of my worst traits, and I imagine it plays a role in people keeping away from me in life. It’s a vicious cycle because the two things both reinforce one another, whichever came first is rather irrelevant. I didn’t always have this offensively gloomy aura though, I think I used to kind of put it on a little. I had romantic ideas of despondent young men and world weary old souls who hate company in mind. And I, only half knowingly, shaped myself in their image.
The prince is quite unlike most of those sorts of people (fictional and real) in one way though, in that he also has a wonderful brightness to counterbalance it, that youthful naivety and openness. I was going to say it’s paradoxical, but actually in thinking about it that’s not right. These two elements of his character are not contradictory, in fact it makes a lot of sense that they would come hand in hand. By being apart from the world of “grown ups” of course on the one hand there is a sadness, but there is also the fact that you haven’t been exposed to a lot of the things that make men cynical. This is also something that I’ve tried a lot to emulate, possibly in part as a reaction against my father who is a very bitter and cynical man. He is also quite a loner generally speaking, but more like the Travis Bickle type I was referring to earlier, jaded by experience.
It’s possible that there is a genetic component, my surname which I share with my dad (and grandfather, and great grandfather, etc.) is an occupational one. That is, it originally described the occupation of the person who held that name. There’s loads of names like this, so a lot of people can figure out from their surname that their ancestors for some time would have been Blacksmiths or Stonemasons or Butchers, and so on. And these professions were kept in the family, you would have done what your father did and his father before him. I don’t want to give my name here, I like keeping semi-anonymous online, but the occupation my surname implies my ancestors (in my paternal line) engaged in would have been a rather solitary one. At least from what I understand about it, I could be completely wrong about all of this, but it does kind of make sense. Traditional professions seem to have gone hand in hand with certain character types, or at least over time they bred a certain temperament.
Back on topic though, I’m not like my dad or these more embittered and resentful types. I am reluctantly judgemental of people, because this modern world requires it, but I also do always try to suspend any prejudice I may have about a person on first interaction. My instinct, or perhaps that’s not the best word as it may be a learned tendency rather than a natural one as I’ve been saying, is to be trusting of a new person when I first meet them. I do generally assume an individual I meet is a good person until proven otherwise, whoever they may be, unlike my dad who does the opposite. This is more like the prince, he is open to others so much so that it kills him.
Fortunately my openness hasn’t killed me yet (or maybe unfortunately), but it has hurt me. It’s an old trope that people like me are easily taken advantage of, and even though I’m very reclusive I’ve still had that happen on more than one occasion. Only in one case has it seriously negatively impacted my life, and even then I got over it pretty quick, but nevertheless it did happen. I could even write an entry or two for this blog about these events, but honestly I don’t actually dwell on these memories too much. I’m not resentful about what happened, in a strange way it validates this view of myself I have and so I’m kind of glad things happened the way they did. A lot of people feel incredibly insulted when they feel like they’ve been taken advantage of, they hold on to that resentment their entire lives, but I suppose I’m too preoccupied with other unhealthy mental fixations.
So yes I have this sadness about me, but I think I also have a rare benignity (although I feel a little weird saying that about myself) that radiates out as well. Again it may seem contradictory at first, I was just saying that the sadness that sometimes shows through this affectionate exterior tends to keep people away. Yet people do tend to like me a lot at the same time, somehow. People have always described me with words like “sweet”, “kind”, “innocent” and so on. Which of course always only reinforces this self perception I have of myself, and seeing as it’s what people respond well to encourages me to embrace this aspect of my character even more firmly. Basically, the people who know me are glad I (and therefore, people like me) exist, but they don’t actually want much to do with me personally.
One time at work this guy came up to me while I was sitting out in the front of the shop. In the summer sometimes it gets really warm inside, so when it’s not busy I just sit outside. He sat next to me, on the ground looking up at me a little as I was on the step, and smiled. We had a brief conversation, he was having a bad day because he had missed both a train and a bus and was therefore very late getting to where he needed to go, but I mostly just listened because I’m incredibly awkward and never know what to say to people. He left after a short while, when his bus arrived, but before leaving he told me something. He said that just staring at my face helped him calm down (very weird thing to say), and that he could tell I was a good person.
Now it’s pretty unusual for someone to be this explicit, and I think he might have been high on some drug, but the general sentiment is not too unusual a thing for me to inspire in someone. And the thing is, I like it. Maybe I’m even somewhat delusional, and that I’m actually entirely wrong about other people’s perception of me. It’s possible I’m just projecting out what I want people to think, but then something like the story above happens and that stops the doubt for a while. Again usually it’s not as clear as that, often just a comment from one of the customers or a feeling I get from how people treat me. I feel like I have more to say but I’m lost for words and I’m really veering off topic.
I’m going to hold on to this book, it’s so short that I imagine I will certainly read it again some day. I wish I had more to say, but I’m not interested in the usual things that come up when people talk about this book. I’m not here to tell you about the importance of “embracing your inner child” or whatever silly interpretations people have that you can find a thousand other articles and blog posts already telling you, I think that kind of analysis really misses the point. Frankly I think that a lot of people use a distorted interpretation of such a message to justify behaviours that aren’t very cute or childlike at all, but are actually rather obnoxious, impulsive and solipsistic. People do all sorts of things that are very much adultlike, under the guise of “childlike curiosity”.
A lot of articles and essays I was able to find tend to say that the purpose of the two drawings right at the start for example, is to show how with adulthood we lose our imagination. Later the various people the prince visits on his interplanetary tour are there to show that as we grow up we tend to become much more focused on the mundane, and that we lose an ability to see with our heart rather than our eyes. Indeed that is a line that another character says, or something very similar, the fox. Now I agree that this is the purpose of these parts of the story, but then there’s this leap that everyone takes which I can’t understand. That therefore we should reject growing up, and remain perpetual children. That all will be well in the world should we simply remember how to think as children do.
I don’t see it, and frankly that would put a rather positive tone (sickeningly positive that is, very hippie-ish) on a book which for me is punctuated throughout with melancholy. I think rather that the book is a lament, for as sad as it is to lose this childlike nature it must happen. The message is not that we need to try and get back in touch with our childlike nature at all, but that we all must grow up. As sad as it may be to say so. Indeed the narrator manages to survive the crash in the Sahara not because he learns once again to see the elephant inside that hat or some equally kitsch plot point, but because of his mechanical knowledge and experience. His personal specialisation is what defines him, just like the man on the lamp post planet is defined by his role. To be sorrowful about something, to have this sorrow be the message of a story, is not necessarily an argument for resisting it.
I think that this book serves people of all ages. To the very young it is this wonderful tale that follows laws only a young child could understand. Flying to different planets with the help of migrating birds, talking plants and animals, being sent across space by a snake’s bite. To the older child/ young teen, it serves as a reminder to enjoy what remains of your childhood years and savour them rather than being so desperate to grow up. It shows you that the freedom you associate with adulthood is not what it seems, indeed in many ways you’re freer at this time than you’ll ever be. Being somewhat grown at this point, you might not take the ending passage with the snake so literally. Indeed if this book exists to mourn the necessary death of childhood, and the prince is the archetypal child, what might this ending symbolise I wonder?
Then to the young adult, still struggling to adapt to adult life, you might have the realisation I’ve had on my most recent reading. That as sad as it is to move on, to struggle against becoming an adult is futile. You’re fighting against something that will always overwhelm you in time. As for older people, I can’t help but be reminded of the quote I took from the dedication note in the book and posted at the start of this entry. Perhaps one day I’ll need reminding, and so for that reason I plan to hold on to this book for now. It’s such a charming story, and it does mean a lot to me. This copy in particular, with it’s browned pages and bent corners, has been part of my life for such a long time. I can’t get rid of it, and as I just said I do believe that I will still have some use for it yet.
Ramblings of a neurotic mess 