To those naïve Roses in our lives ...

The Little Prince: Review

May we all have those certain naïve roses in our lives that hold all the sad power over our hearts, as those are the ones worth living for.

The book is deceptive with its simplicity but as they say Genius is in simplicity. This little children’s book can unravel the suppressed longing of nostalgia, and the forgotten sense of understanding the fragile beauty of life, that are bestowed on us by the overwhelming freight of the vile life. To set the expectations right, it is for sure not a children’s book. It is by all means a book for adults, given adults could read with their hearts. "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”

The little prince is a book that must be read at the three stages of your life, as a child, as a young adult and as an older adult. The philosophy of the book makes sense if you read and reread anytime.

It is a story of a curious child, who wanted to know all the answers and kept asking incessantly until he was convinced and this should be the take away for a child from the book.

But, sadly the story is much more than this. It is a melancholic love story. A story of forbidden love that is not fathomed by a poor heart in time and when he does realise it, it’s too late to be one with that love.

The little prince comes down on earth from his faraway planet leaving a fragile flower that is in love with him, but the frangible flower could not explain its love to the prince, as he would not understand. The prince was too absorbed by the worldly distractions and comes down to earth in search of meaning and friends but meets his end instead. The prince meets a lot of people on his way, each symbolises our dysfunctional society.

The prince on the way to the Earth meets, a king, who has nobody to rule, a conceited man who is full of himself, a drunkard who drinks as he is sad he has been drinking, a businessman busy in vain calculations, a lamplighter, and a geographer who has not seen his own planet, all of whom are exhausted by their own indulgences.

The prince meets a snake, upon the onset of his journey on the Earth. And the snake befriends the Prince, instantly. "Whomever I touch, I send back to the earth from whence he came," and so being true to its nature the snake bites the prince. In the meantime, the prince meets the fox, who reminds the Prince of the abandoned rose and he realises his love for the flower. But, the prince is faraway and the flower in on his planet.

Key take aways:

“She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her...” The most important things in life are not seen but are felt with the heart.

“You're beautiful, but you're empty. No one could die for you.”, say the prince to the other flowers in the world.

“But why do you always speak in riddles?”, to which the snake responds with another indirect answer: “I solve them all”. At the promise of uniting the prince with his true love, the snake killed the prince. Whether the prince asked for it or not, the snake behaved in accordance with its nature.

“In the course of this life I have had a great many encounters with a great many people who have been concerned with matters of consequence. I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn't much improved my opinion of them."

“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.” My suggestion to these adults: read children’s book, as these might bring the dead children in you back to life and teach you the true meaning of it.

NOT SO FUN FACT: The author Saint-Exupéry, crashed in the Libyan desert, while fighting a war started by the adults.