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A late-summer Sunday is synonymous with vermouth at Can Déu, football, and -of course- Lego.
Today, The Grandma has invited Claire Fontaine to build four magnificent Lego sets based on The Little Prince -a masterpiece by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that also happens to be one of The Grandma's most beloved books, because it speaks of something as complexly simple as life itself.
There are books that belong to childhood. There are books that we discover as adults. And then there are a few extraordinary books that seem to accompany us throughout our entire lives. The Little Prince is one of them.
Published in 1943 and written and illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a universal son of Lyon, Le Petit Prince appears, at first sight, to be a children's story. There are drawings, tiny planets, talking flowers, strange adults and a little blond boy who travels through the universe asking questions.
But appearances, as the Little Prince himself teaches us, can be deceptive. Behind its apparent simplicity lies one of the most profound reflections ever written about love, friendship, loneliness, responsibility, loss and what it means to be human. Perhaps that is why The Little Prince is not really a book for children. Nor is it a book for adults. It is simply a book for life.
The story begins with one of literature's most memorable misunderstandings. As a child, the narrator draws a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. Adults look at the picture and see a hat. So the boy draws the inside of the snake to make the meaning obvious. The adults advise him to abandon drawing and concentrate instead on geography, history, arithmetic and grammar. And in only a few pages, Saint-Exupéry establishes one of the central ideas of the book. Growing older and growing wiser are not necessarily the same thing.
The adults in The Little Prince have acquired knowledge, status, possessions and responsibilities, but somewhere along the way many of them have lost something essential: the ability to see beyond appearances.
The Little Prince has not. He asks questions. He observes. He wonders. He refuses to accept something merely because everybody else considers it normal. And perhaps this is the first philosophical invitation of the book: adulthood should not require us to abandon the child we once were.
During his journey, the Little Prince visits several tiny planets. On each one he meets an adult. There is a king who wants to rule even when there is almost nobody to rule. A vain man who needs constant admiration. A drunkard who drinks because he is ashamed of drinking. A businessman obsessed with counting and owning stars. A lamplighter endlessly following orders. And a geographer who writes about the world without actually exploring it.
They are amusing characters. But they are also mirrors. Each has reduced life to a single obsession: power, admiration, possession, routine, knowledge without experience.
Saint-Exupéry's satire is gentle, but devastating. These adults are so busy organising life that they have forgotten to live it. And perhaps this is one reason why reading The Little Prince as an adult can be slightly uncomfortable. Eventually, we recognise ourselves.
How many things do we count simply because society has taught us that numbers prove their value? Money. Followers. Productivity. Qualifications. Possessions. Years. Achievements.
The businessman counts stars and believes that owning them makes him important. The Little Prince cannot understand why. Sometimes neither should we.
Then there is the rose. The Little Prince loves his rose, but loving her is not easy. She is beautiful, proud, demanding and contradictory. He is young and does not yet know how to understand her. So he leaves his asteroid. Only later does he begin to understand what she meant to him. When he reaches Earth and discovers a garden containing thousands of roses, he is devastated. He had believed that his rose was unique. Apparently she is not.
And then the fox teaches him one of the most important lessons in the book. What makes someone unique is not necessarily what they are. It is the relationship we have created with them. The Little Prince's rose matters because he has watered her. Protected her. Listened to her. Worried about her. Spent time with her.
Love transforms one rose among thousands into his rose. Saint-Exupéry is telling us that value does not simply exist. Sometimes we create it through care.
Perhaps no character expresses the philosophy of The Little Prince more beautifully than the fox. The fox asks the Little Prince to tame him. But taming does not mean domination. It means creating ties. Before their friendship, the Little Prince is merely one little boy among thousands, and the fox merely one fox among thousands. Afterwards, they become unique to each other.
That uniqueness has a price. If we create bonds, separation can hurt. The fox knows this from the beginning. And still he chooses friendship. That is an extraordinarily mature idea for a book often placed on children's shelves. Saint-Exupéry does not promise that love will protect us from sadness. He suggests almost the opposite. We can suffer because we have loved. But the solution is not to avoid loving.
The memories, meaning and transformation created by that relationship make the vulnerability worthwhile. The colour of the wheat will remind the fox of the Little Prince's golden hair. After somebody has become important to us, the world itself contains reminders of them. Absence changes presence.
The fox teaches another lesson that connects love with something we can never recover: time. The Little Prince's rose is important because of the time he has devoted to her. This idea is extraordinarily simple and extraordinarily profound. Our most valuable gift is rarely an object.
It is often time.
Time spent listening. Time spent caring. Time spent teaching. Time spent travelling with someone. Time spent sitting beside somebody when there is nothing useful to say. Time spent simply being there.
Money can sometimes be recovered. Possessions can be replaced. Time cannot.
And therefore the time we freely give to another person may be one of the purest forms of love. The fox's lesson does not end with affection. Love creates responsibility. Once we establish a genuine bond with another being, we cannot behave as though that relationship has no consequences. This is true of friendship. Of family. Of love. Perhaps even of our relationship with animals, communities and the world around us. The Little Prince learns that loving his rose means accepting responsibility for her.
Not ownership. Responsibility. There is an enormous difference.
Much of the framing story takes place in the Sahara, where the narrator has crashed his aeroplane. The desert seems empty. Yet emptiness is one of Saint-Exupéry's great illusions. A desert may conceal a well. A house may contain memories. A star may contain somebody we love. The visible world never tells the entire story. That is why the book repeatedly invites us to look beyond surfaces. The things that give life meaning -love, trust, memory, loyalty, friendship- cannot normally be weighed or counted. They do not appear on balance sheets. They cannot be photographed easily. And yet they may be more real to us than almost anything we can touch.
And eventually The Little Prince becomes a book about loss. This is perhaps where reading it at different stages of life changes the book most profoundly. A child may experience the ending as mysterious. An adult who has experienced separation or bereavement may read those same pages very differently. Saint-Exupéry does something remarkable. He does not pretend that absence is not painful. Instead, he transforms memory into another form of presence. After the Little Prince leaves, the stars will never again be simply stars for the narrator. Somewhere among them is his friend. And therefore the entire night sky has changed. The person may be absent. But the relationship has altered the world permanently. Anyone who has deeply missed somebody can understand this.
Sometimes a street becomes a memory. A song becomes a person. A smell becomes a childhood. A photograph becomes a conversation. A star becomes somebody who is no longer beside us.
Perhaps this is why The Little Prince can comfort without offering easy consolation. It understands that love survives in the way we continue to see the world.
There is another curious thing about The Little Prince. You can read exactly the same words at ten, twenty, forty or seventy years old. The words have not changed. But you have. And therefore the book changes too. Read it when you are a child and you may understand the Little Prince. Read it when you are young and you may understand the rose. Read it after falling in love and you may understand the fox. Read it after losing somebody and you may understand the stars. Read it when life has become too busy and perhaps you will suddenly recognise the businessman counting things that do not really matter. Read it when you feel lost and you may understand the pilot alone in the desert.
The book waits patiently for us. And each time we return, it seems to know which lesson we need.
Perhaps the story becomes even more moving when we remember who wrote it. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was not simply a writer imagining an aviator. He was himself a pioneering pilot. He flew dangerous postal routes across Africa and South America and experienced crashes, isolation and the immense solitude of the sky and desert. Then came war. Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince during exile in the United States while Europe was being torn apart by the Second World War.
In 1944, he returned to flying reconnaissance missions. On 31 July, he took off from Corsica. He never returned. His aircraft disappeared over the Mediterranean. The man who had written about a little prince who leaves Earth and becomes associated forever with the stars had himself vanished into the sky. It is difficult to read the ending in quite the same way after knowing that.
Maybe this is ultimately why The Little Prince never grows old. Technology changes. Countries change. Societies change. We change. But human beings continue asking remarkably similar questions.
Who do I love? Who loves me? What deserves my time? What have I lost? What am I responsible for? What really matters? And what will remain when I am gone?
Saint-Exupéry does not answer these questions with philosophical theories. He gives us a boy. A rose. A fox. A desert. A well. And a sky full of stars.
Perhaps we are all, in some way, little travellers moving from one tiny planet to another, meeting people, creating bonds, making mistakes, saying goodbye and slowly discovering what deserves to be called essential.
That may be why there is no wrong moment to read The Little Prince.
Read it when you are happy. Read it when you are lonely. Read it when you have fallen in love. Read it when somebody has left. Read it when you are beginning something. Read it when something has ended. Read it when you know exactly where you are going. And read it when you have absolutely no idea. Because The Little Prince is not really a book that tells us how to live. It simply reminds us to look again at the life we are already living.
And perhaps, beneath all the numbers, obligations, possessions and noise of the grown-up world, to ask ourselves whether we can still see the elephant inside the boa constrictor.
After all, the essential things were never meant to be seen with the eyes.
Download The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Et tes amis seront bien étonnés
And you will sometimes open your window,
And your friends will be properly astonished
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