Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) was a certified badass who happened to write one of those books that makes grown men weep into their whiskey, The Little Prince, which seems like a kids' book until you realize it's about loneliness, love, and how most adults are dead inside without knowing it. Heavy stuff for a book with drawings of a kid and a flower.
But Saint-Exupéry wasn't sitting in some café in Paris philosophizing about life. He lived it. The man flew mail routes across the Sahara in the 1920s when aviation was basically controlled suicide. Engines failed. Planes crashed. People died. He survived a wreck in the Libyan desert, nearly died of dehydration, and hallucinated his way through it. Most writers who claim to be adventurers are full of shit, they take one difficult trip and dine out on it for decades. Not this guy. He was an airmail pilot when that job was essentially a death sentence with a romantic job title.
He wrote Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars, books that understood something essential about why we do dangerous, stupid things. It's not about conquering nature or proving something to daddy. It's about that moment when you're alone in a cockpit at 3 a.m., or standing in a desert under more stars than you knew existed, and you finally understand how small and how significant you are at the same time.
Then World War II happened. Saint-Exupéry was 44, too old for combat flying, with injuries that should've grounded him permanently. He pulled strings, lied about his condition, and got himself back in a cockpit. In 1944, he took off on a reconnaissance mission over occupied France and never came back. No mayday, no wreckage found for decades, just gone. Some people get the ending they deserve, not in a cosmic justice way, but in a way that makes sense.
Saint-Exupéry disappeared into the sky.
Where else would he go?
Resistance 2020
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to themAntoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince Children and families gather at the road block on Highway One in Santa Cruz begging the state for more resources to fight the CZULightningComplex Fire. Here’s what you need […]
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Wanderlust 2015
WANDERLUST: Bolinas sunset… This raggedy edge of the continent, where the Mesa drops into the Pacific like God’s own ashtray has the kind of beautiful decay that makes you understand why people become insufferable about places. The light here doesn’t apologize. It just bleeds out across tide pools and driftwood and the barnacled pier pilings, […]
ReadAdventure 2013
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea… Antoine de Saint Exupery There’s something almost obscene about seeing a boat out of water, like catching your grandmother naked or finding out […]
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