Adults, Hats, and Boa Constrictors

Adults would say this is a strawberry. But this is a doodle of my heart after reading "The Little Prince." It is full. The emotions I felt while reading are boiling, brimming, and bulging out. 

I read "The Little Prince" at a time when I am struggling with motivation for school. Adult things suck the life out of you (and more specifically your imagination and sincerity), and "The Little Prince" addresses that with its poignant critique of adulthood contrasted with the little prince himself. 

The little prince, first of all, believes in the narrators ability to draw. He encourages him. At the age of six, the narrator drew an elephant inside of a boa constrictor and everyone else labeled it a hat. This works under the assumption that children are inherently imaginative, but parents and other adults often stifle this creativity with their labels and real world experience. Children, on the other hand, can operate within a world independent of ours. The setting of the story, however, is interesting then because it is grounded in reality in its relation to Earth. Perhaps, instead, we are exploring the inner workings of an imaginative adult. It is, after all, written by an adult.

The book is also dedicated to an adult, which the author apologizes for, and the revises that it is dedicated to the childhood version of that adult. Then, maybe, the little prince is the childhood version of the author. The focus is not so much the size, but his title emphasizes his age. He is the only young person who owns his own planet. Everyone else that has a planet is an adult, and they waste it on ridiculous things as the little prince points out. The king for example just wants to be able to claim that he reigns over something else. The businessman counts the stars as his property, and the little prince compares him to the drunkard he met previously. The book often addresses the audience, making commentary about adults as the narrator tells us of his worry about becoming like other grown-ups “who are no longer interested in anything but numbers.” They would rather hear the number of the asteroid than about the wonderful things that existed on it. The one redeeming adult is the lamp lighter. “He’s the only one who doesn’t strike me as ridiculous. Perhaps it’s because he’s thinking of something besides himself” (p. 43). More problematic than adulthood eliminating imagination is the selfishness that adulthood is purported to breeds, according to the narrator.

But just as the flower allows the boy to experience love, and the fox teaches him what that means, the boy teaches the pilot about love, and essentially empowers him. Not only does the boy remind the man of drawing and imagination, he also provides the man an experience to focus on someone other than himself. When the boy starts to cry, in spite of the imminent danger of being stranded in the desert, the pilot sets his task aside to listen. It empowers him, and saves him. He was probably not in a literal desert, but a metaphorical desert of selfish, lifeless adulthood. I am reminded of the scene in “A Little Princess” where it is imagination and hope that allows the servant girls to survive, and Sarah to help her father remember.

Unlike the adults of the story, the little prince’s story from the fox teaches us that, “Anything essential is invisible to the eyes” (p. 63). It is empathy, creativity, love, and imagination that are fundamental to our existence, not money and power as adults in the story believe. “Children understand,” (p. 72) and thus we re-learn how to be imaginative and thoughtful through children.