'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Wind, Sand and Stars

‘You hadn’t read that? I read that before I was…… I thought everyone had read that!’ is what I am expecting on the airing of this article. ‘How can anyone not have known about that!’ Well, I didn’t and thanks a lot friend for sharing it with me!

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote ‘The Little Prince’ which I understand to be a classic and also have not read, but my eyes have never smarted, my breath has never shortened, and my heart has never missed so many beats on reading anything as on reading the first seventy pages of this other small book of his.

It was previously entitled ‘Terre des homes’ (Land of men), which the author was subsequently persuaded to change to the heading above, and it is important that you obtain the Penguin published William Rees translation, which follows his original text. Saint-Exupéry’s writing is, quoting The Spectator, ‘Some of the finest prose written in this (to us, the last) century, lyrical, at times visionary, polished and still fresh.’ This translation is full of these qualities. 

At its most basic, Saint-Exupéry’s story is a ‘first hand’ pilot’s account of some of those who flew for the pioneer French commercial airline Latécoère, later to evolve into Air France. These men opened the world for us at a loss of life probably proportionate to that incurred over the skies of Europe in the Second World War. But we soon discover that his saga is interwoven with a host of other obtusely related and equally moving stories, all pointing as inexorably as his aircraft compass, not simply to the exploration of an unknown world, but to that of man himself.

Saint-Exupéry’s approach is philosophical rather than religious, and he sees the onrushing modern world from the vantage point of his 1930’s aeroplane. He sees the impact of modern machines and what defines them. He sees their inevitability, their fascination and their danger. His writing style and ideas are not modernist, but with statements like: “It seems that perfection is obtained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. At the climax of its evolution, the machine conceals itself entirely.” you would be forgiven for assuming him to be not only modernist, but the first minimalist and a religious man at that.

The book divides itself into three parts. The first seventy odd pages, briefly described above is followed by an account of Saint-Exupery and his engineer’s miraculous survival from a crash in the middle of the waterless Libyan Desert, and finally there is a fourteen page reflection on the sense, the meaning, the ‘truth’, which in the very act of being we all seek. By this time he is a reporter caught up in The Spanish Civil War, and sees our world ‘cracking apart’. He is prophetic as he is profound and the dilemma he describes is as real today as it ever was. The beast has many heads but one sword will cut them all off. He has such a blade and a mighty weapon it is!

He cuts deep. He shows us our diseases and how that to truly be alive we cannot be caught up in the machine, but must be out of its control and larger than life itself. 

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