Subscribe to Outside Magazine
advertisement
Survival Guru

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Eco Adventurer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? answer

Videos Ask Dave
  • What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
  • Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
  • How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries
save this page print this page email this page
  • share this page

Outside Magazine, August 2004
Page:
1 2 3 4 

The Hard Way
Goodnight Sweet Prince

By Mark Jenkins

IF YOU WANT to know who Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was, and why he should be read, you must plunge into Wind, Sand and Stars and Flight to Arras, two of the finest adventure books of the 20th century. Wind, Sand and Stars won the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Academie Française in 1939 and the National Book Award in 1940, whereas Flight to Arras was banned in his homeland for being unpatriotic. Both my copies are thumb-worn and underlined—they are dense stones in my literary foundation.

Wind, Sand and Stars is a lyrical memoir of Saint-Exupéry's formative years of flying—his adventures winging the French mail over the Sahara, the pride of responsibility, the satisfaction of perfecting his craft, the love found among comrades sharing a cause. These same themes resound in Flight to Arras, a much darker, conspicuously spiritual book that chronicles the fall of France to the Nazis through the experiences of a French fighter pilot. Together, the two books are an homage to a life of personal integrity and action.

"The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me," Saint-Exupéry writes in Flight to Arras. "What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate." Like Whitman, Conrad, and Hemingway, Saint-Exupéry believed that complete immersion in one's chosen métier was fundamental, that "one needs to live in order to write. One needs to have something to say." And then he must say it with clarity and passion.

"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away." I've had this quote from Wind, Sand and Stars tacked on my office wall for 20 years.

Saint-Exupéry wrote at night and flew at night and wrote while he was flying at night. "Night, the beloved," he rhapsodizes in Flight to Arras. "Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree."

Yet what raises Saint-Exupéry's work above mere adventure writing and into the realm of literature is his willingness to go beyond the vagaries of one life and openly examine the universal questions of humankind. By today's standards, his language is unfashionably lofty and affirmative, neither reveling in minutiae nor discreetly concealing his opinion. Saint-Exupéry was not a postmodern writer. He was a thinker and a doer, a philosopher and an adventurer—as unafraid of making bold proclamations as he was of flying faulty planes over treacherous routes.

In Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Exupéry meditates on the meaning of his fledgling mail plane, recognizing it as evidence of a larger human impulse: "The central struggle of men has ever been to understand one another, to join together for the common weal. And it is this very thing that the machine helps them to do. It begins by annihilating time and space." Near the end of Flight to Arras, grappling with the blight of fascism and the militarism required to fight it, Saint-Exupéry asserts, "It is easy to establish a society upon the foundation of rigid rules. It is easy to shape the kind of man who submits blindly and without protest to a master. . . . The real task is to succeed in setting man free by making him master of himself."

Saint-Exupéry would not have been remembered as a pilot; he was just one of many valiant aviation pioneers. But it was the act of flying that set him free, and it was through the process of writing that he mastered himself. Sailing above the earth for so many years gave him an aerial perspective on the human condition, yet his writing was always more about compassion than courage, more about brotherhood than boldness. Near the end of Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Exupéry writes, "It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world."

And he did.
Page:
1 2 3 4 


Outside columnist MARK JENKINS's latest book is The Hard Way.
• Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!
• Give the gift of Outside Magazine!
• Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.