Take a photo of a barcode or cover
loreofyupu 's review for:
The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
I started reading this short children's classic with no knowledge of the nature of its contents and no idea of what I wanted to take away from it. I had perhaps assumed, judging by its meagre size, that it would be a sweet parable. What I did not expect was to experience what I can only explain as an acid trip (not that I'd know much about it myself save what little I have gleaned from representations of it in media). Listening to an audiobook of it with celestial musical accompaniment made tingles rush down my spine. And made me grateful for not having picked it up at a younger age for I would have appallingly missed the significance of it.
The little prince is the sole inhabitant of an asteroid little larger than himself. He has a rose for company and he spends his days protecting her from the wind, watering her and tending to her. One day, finding that he can no longer tolerate the rose's vanity and demands, he leaves his home and embarks on a journey through space by the means of dangling off a flock of migratory birds. He visits a series of asteroids before landing on Earth. Each asteroid is occupied by one grown-up reduced to performing one function for the rest of their lives. They are strange beyond measure but essentially represent the vices of humans. One man, for example, claims he owns the stars and obsessively keeps count of them through lengthy calculations in order to know exactly how many he owns. Another incessantly drinks to forget that he is ashamed of being a drunkard. Upon landing on Earth, the little prince encounters the narrator stranded in a desert and recounts his explorations to him.
Every occurrence in The Little Prince is ridiculous, down to the neat little setting of men sitting on asteroids floating in space. Inspite of it being scientifically implausible, I never questioned the reasoning behind it since the otherworldly atmosphere seems to flawlessly accommodate the ideas it represents. It is surreal and abstract but not muddled by over-explanation. Since the author provides as little detail as possible, most of the vacant spaces are conveniently filled up by the reader's imagination. What aids the imagination are illustrations smattered across the pages made by the author himself. Although simply written, each sentence by itself can stand as a sentence of much depth and consequence. It delves into the philosophy of absurdism and the idea that everything intrinsically is meaningless unless we assign our personal meaning to it.
On Earth, the prince discovers a rose garden filled with thousands of roses. Here is what he has to say to them:
You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you- the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars; because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.
Although compact, The Little Prince packages a panoply of intense emotions. There is not a lot to show in terms of plot but when it talks of the stars and the moonlit desert and loneliness, it washes over you an inexplicable nostalgia. It is a book to be revisited and cherished, not to be read for aha! moments and cliffhangers. It is not a book for children; it is a book for those nostalgic for the security of childhood. With its deceptively childish illustrations it lured me in and unceremoniously dumped me into the ever-speeding train chugging away towards adulthood. Once on this path, there is no way back- but you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that you can always look up at the sky to reminisce on all that no longer is and the stars will answer with laughter like the sound of millions of little bells.
There is sweetness in the laughter of all the stars.
I started reading this short children's classic with no knowledge of the nature of its contents and no idea of what I wanted to take away from it. I had perhaps assumed, judging by its meagre size, that it would be a sweet parable. What I did not expect was to experience what I can only explain as an acid trip (not that I'd know much about it myself save what little I have gleaned from representations of it in media). Listening to an audiobook of it with celestial musical accompaniment made tingles rush down my spine. And made me grateful for not having picked it up at a younger age for I would have appallingly missed the significance of it.
The little prince is the sole inhabitant of an asteroid little larger than himself. He has a rose for company and he spends his days protecting her from the wind, watering her and tending to her. One day, finding that he can no longer tolerate the rose's vanity and demands, he leaves his home and embarks on a journey through space by the means of dangling off a flock of migratory birds. He visits a series of asteroids before landing on Earth. Each asteroid is occupied by one grown-up reduced to performing one function for the rest of their lives. They are strange beyond measure but essentially represent the vices of humans. One man, for example, claims he owns the stars and obsessively keeps count of them through lengthy calculations in order to know exactly how many he owns. Another incessantly drinks to forget that he is ashamed of being a drunkard. Upon landing on Earth, the little prince encounters the narrator stranded in a desert and recounts his explorations to him.
Every occurrence in The Little Prince is ridiculous, down to the neat little setting of men sitting on asteroids floating in space. Inspite of it being scientifically implausible, I never questioned the reasoning behind it since the otherworldly atmosphere seems to flawlessly accommodate the ideas it represents. It is surreal and abstract but not muddled by over-explanation. Since the author provides as little detail as possible, most of the vacant spaces are conveniently filled up by the reader's imagination. What aids the imagination are illustrations smattered across the pages made by the author himself. Although simply written, each sentence by itself can stand as a sentence of much depth and consequence. It delves into the philosophy of absurdism and the idea that everything intrinsically is meaningless unless we assign our personal meaning to it.
On Earth, the prince discovers a rose garden filled with thousands of roses. Here is what he has to say to them:
You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you- the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars; because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.
Although compact, The Little Prince packages a panoply of intense emotions. There is not a lot to show in terms of plot but when it talks of the stars and the moonlit desert and loneliness, it washes over you an inexplicable nostalgia. It is a book to be revisited and cherished, not to be read for aha! moments and cliffhangers. It is not a book for children; it is a book for those nostalgic for the security of childhood. With its deceptively childish illustrations it lured me in and unceremoniously dumped me into the ever-speeding train chugging away towards adulthood. Once on this path, there is no way back- but you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that you can always look up at the sky to reminisce on all that no longer is and the stars will answer with laughter like the sound of millions of little bells.
There is sweetness in the laughter of all the stars.