Accounted for

Today, Agence France-Presse announced that a plane wreck has been discovered off the coast of France. The plane has been identified as belonging to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This is certainly not a recent crash: Saint-Exupéry disappeared 60 years ago and although it was speculated that the plane he flew went down, the accident was never confirmed.

‘The Little Prince,’ written by Saint-Exupéry, was first published in 1943. The Times reports that it has since been translated into more than 100 languages and is third on the all-time-anywhere best seller list, after the Bible and Marx’s Das Kapital.

Das Kapital is second on the list of best sellers? Can you list ten people you know who have read Das Kapital? (I can be included on your list as it was required reading for me at the U of Warsaw; but then, I was an econometrics major and this was Poland in the 60-70s!) I would think that if you were going to be Marx obsessed you’d pick up the Communist Manifesto, not Das Kapital.

As for ‘The Little Prince’ – well, for me, too, it was a truly magical little book, but I don’t know why it uniformly inspires such feelings of rapture. It is quite a simple story. One might say that it is sort of the opposite of Das Kapital in that way. Are the same people reading both??? After the eyestrain of paging through Marx, ‘The Little Prince’ may well offer the perfect antidote.

‘The Little Prince’ is one of those books that makes you think that surely there is a subtext, a Great Meaning of some sort. It’s not hard to imagine a Great Meaning hidden in simple statements about our planet –as seen from the eyes of an interstellar traveler. Now that I’m remembering it, I can see how easy it is to get lost in the imagination of that storyteller. And the illustrations – well, after reading the Bible and Das Kapital, one would be so GRATEFUL for a book with illustrations. Gentle words, soothing pictures, nice text, possibly with Great Meaning, but probably not. Yeah, a nice relaxing moment, lyrical, calming to your senses, allowing you to forget about the deeply troubled world described in the “top two” best selling texts.