"All grown-ups were children first. (But few remember it)."

There are certain books that you wander back to as an adult. Gravity pulls you to their dusty bindings, stuck deep somewhere in a bedroom closet. It can be years or even decades later, but when you finally open the pages they seem to be speaking a completely new language. It's as if the entire book changed along with you.

So you analyze the prose, picking the books apart word by word. How did I read this as child? I never remember it being so short! you think to yourself. Or maybe you just never had the need to read it so quickly. That feeling you had as a child, the one where you knew the book was telling you something, but you weren't really sure what it was, is long gone. Of course now you know what the author is saying. How could you not! The illustrations, which before had helped explain the book as much as the words are now nothing more than footnotes.

The Little Prince , by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, is one of these books. Exupéry seems to say there's no going back; no way to see the world as you once did. We grown-ups, blinded by things, our own self-importance, and as Exupéry writes, “numbers”, just don't have same good sense as children.

""If you tell grown-ups, "I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof...," they won't be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them, "I saw a house worth a hundred thousand francs." Then they exclaim, "What a pretty house!""

As I was trying to recall my first time reading The Little Prince I felt as if Exupéry was telling me over and over gain to just give up. There’s no hope for us grown-ups, just as there's no hope for the narrator, living out his final days awaiting the Little Prince's return.

But maybe, years ago, I would have seen the Prince’s return as inevitable. And just like that, The Little Prince I had read so many years ago became a jumble of foreign words; a sealed tome, forever untranslatable.



From Antoine de Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince:

""Nothing's perfect," sighed the fox. "My life is monotonous. I hunt chickens; people hunt me. All chickens are just alike, and all men are just alike. So I'm rather bored. But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I'll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Other footsteps send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music. And then, look! You see the wheat fields over there? I don't eat bread. For me, wheat is no use whatever. Wheat fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So it will be wonderful, once you've tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I'll love the sound of the wind in the wheat...""