Today's Question What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer 
Today's Question What are the greenest colleges? answer 
Online FavoritesSpecial Issues
Photo Galleries |
The Hard Way Goodnight Sweet Prince By Mark Jenkins BORN IN 1900 into a declining aristocratic French family, Saint-Exupéry was raised with his three sisters and one brother in a Louis XVI château near Lyon by a household of intelligent, tolerant women, including several aunts and a grandmother. His father died of a stroke before he was four years old, and he became deeply attached to his mother. A dreamy, artistic child, Saint-Exupéry was writing poetry and plays by six or seven, the plays often extravagantly performed with his family as the audience. He routinely wrote late at night, and would wake one of his siblings or cousins to listen to his compositions. Saint-Exupéry took his first flight when he was 12, after hanging around the tiny Ambérieu airport, in southeastern France, for several weeks, pestering the pilots and mechanics. His mother had forbidden him to fly, but insubordination was already a well-developed aspect of his character. He got himself taken up for two short loops, and his life-long love affair began. In 1921, he took expensive flight lessons and joined the military. He spent the better part of his two-year service flying a Breguet 14, sometimes making six flights a day. In 1926 Saint-Exupéry was hired by Aéropostale, the private French mail service. He began his apprenticeship as an airplane mechanic, was soon test-flying each new Breguet 14 the company bought, and within a year was transporting the mail from France to Spain over the Pyrenees. For four years beginning in 1927, Saint-Exupéry flew routes over northwestern Africa, Patagonia, and the Andes. It was an emotional calling as much as a career, something that he would not experience again until World War II. Saint-Exupéry spent most of the thirties and early forties doing more writing than flying. He covered the Spanish Civil War; wrote for magazines like Paris Soir and Harper's Bazaar; and published books, including Night Flight, a 1931 novel about flying the night mail over South America, Wind, Sand and Stars, and The Little Prince. After his plane was found, I was spurred to revisit The Little Prince with my two daughters. We read it together, taking chapters in turn. Teal, my nine-year-old, particularly enjoyed the miniature prince's encounters with the inhabitants of other minuscule planets—the king, the conceited man, the lamplighter—in which the obvious allegories are outweighed by the simple, outlandish magic of the tale. Addi, a 12-year-old realist, found the whole thing a bit absurd for her tastes. On the surface, The Little Prince is a pleasingly quirky fairy tale that reveals the obsessions of adulthood and deserves its worldwide popularity. Read with the knowledge of the author's private anguish, it is a symbolic tale of loneliness and loss. Either way, it would be an injustice for Saint-Exupéry to be remembered solely for this one small gem.
Outside columnist MARK JENKINS's latest book is The Hard Way.
|
Resort Finderadvertisement
 
 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
More From Outside Online
Outside Exclusives
Ask the Experts
Outside Features
Outside Photo Galleries
Top Gear
- Climbing Gear Reviews
- Mountain Bike Reviews
- Ski Gear Reviews
- Sleeping Bag Reviews
- Trail Runner Reviews
Personalities & Profiles
Outside Blogs
Outside Classics
- Home |
- Travel |
- Gear |
- Bodywork |
- Culture |
- Videos |
- Ski |
- Photos |
- Archives |
- Feedback |
- RSS Feeds |
- Subscribe to Outside Magazine
©1994-2009 Mariah Media Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction of material from any pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.
Reproduction of material from any pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.