With the film adaptation of The Little Prince having recently come out, I wanted to share something I wrote about the book a while back.
But first, a backstory: A couple of months ago, one of my favorite writers, Regina, was giving away the complete boxed set of Sandman by Neil Gaiman for her birthday to a reader (which turned out to be me. Holla at yo boy! Hahaha) Anyway, I read the first three Sandman graphic novels back in college, and instantly felt connected to the world of Dreams. But life got in the way, and I graduated before I could borrow the rest of the series from the school library. So when Regina posted on her blog that she was going to give away a complete set, who was I to say no to Lord Morpheus? All we had to do was answer: what book has changed your life?
The question was simple enough, but not quite; she didn't ask for my favorite book. We often come across books, films, and songs that easily make it to our favorites list, but most of them don't change our lives.
It goes without saying, I wrote about The Little Prince.
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‘Life-changing’ is a pretty loaded word. When I think of 'life-changing', car crashes, near-death experiences, and extreme heartbreak immediately come to mind, while The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is such a tiny book that feels light and almost impalpable in my hands.
I first met the Little Prince when I was 11 years old. At the time, it was required reading for English class, and naturally, at eleven, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the world. I didn't want to travel to Asteroid B-612 and learn about the little prince and his rose; I was much more interested in the Harry Potter book that had just come out at the time. I sped through the 100 or so pages in one sitting, felt disappointed with the lack of a happy ending, and forgot about it just as quickly as I finished it.
The second time I met the little prince was last year. Fresh out of college, (and in the midst of a quarter life crisis — but that’s an entirely different story for another day) I was cleaning out my room of everything I no longer needed. The Little Prince was sitting quietly on my bookshelf. I was feeling pretty nostalgic so I stopped cleaning for a while and began to read. It took me much longer to finish it this time, because I kept going back to the pages I loved. By the end of it, I felt incredibly sad, it gave me this physical ache in my heart, and I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was.
There was this one paragraph in particular that I wanted to highlight in neon yellow:
Sometimes I think about how silly humans are, to make such a huge deal over so little, to lose sleep over a text message, to smile and laugh and cry over people, events, and experiences that feel insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Our lives feel so formulaic and futile, and we struggle for years only to die. At the risk of sounding like a teenager writing in her Livejournal, I often wonder: Why bother? What’s the point? The world is full of people and yet, it’s lonely. In reality, we’re all just insignificant specks of dust in the universe, as Calvin and Hobbes once said.
The city is full of strangers. A man sitting across my table in a restaurant is just another face in a sea of nameless faces. Just another nobody, but he could mean the world to someone else. The more I think about it, the more I realize that everything, by default, is meaningless. Everything starts out as an empty shell, and it’s our job to invest our time and effort and energy into people and places and experiences, no matter how temporary they may be, because they stay with you for a lifetime. And maybe our Great Purpose isn’t to end world hunger or achieve world peace; perhaps it is as simple as becoming someone to somebody.
At the end of the book, the little prince has to die (in the human definition of death) in order to go back to his planet to the rose he loves. It wasn’t the happy ending my 11-year old self expected, but now, I find it quite beautiful.
As a child, I didn’t connect with the Little Prince because I took it at face value and saw it as it was: a story of a pilot who encounters a prince while stranded in the Sahara desert. The second time around, the Little Prince was a story about growing up, allowing oneself to be vulnerable, and seeing the world not with the eyes but with one’s heart. What made the book so meaningful this time wasn’t in the plot but rather, between the lines. It meant something to me because I allowed it to tame me.
So did The Little Prince change my life? It may be too early to tell. There were no fireworks or epiphanies or earth-shattering revelations. Just quiet truths about life that I must have already known, but much like a grownup, was far too busy with ‘matters of consequence’ to notice. What I can say, though, that it changed my perspective on a lot of things, and in more ways than books with hundreds of pages ever could. And I can only hope that maybe next time I meet the little prince in the next phase of my life, I’ll find the well hidden somewhere in the beautiful desert.
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