Coming late to the Wind, Sand and Stars this month, TimHannigan wrote: "Within a few lines you know you are flying with a pilot of the highest calibre." I've rarely seen such universal acclaim for an author. We might have questioned his politics, but we couldn't condemn them. And no one doubted the quality of his writing. It may be a slim volume, but it contains worlds. So many, in fact, that it's only now, at the end of our month of reading, and a couple of weeks since I first reached the remarkable last chapter, that I've really begun to piece together what the book is about and what it means.
In saying that, I wouldn't want to suggest that Saint-Exupéry is obtuse or confusing. In fact, he's remarkably clear. It's just that there's so much going on beneath the surface – and that this surface is so dazzling that it's sometimes hard to see beyond it. In the besotted post I wrote while still reading the book, I focused almost exclusively on that lovely exterior: the men who opened up the world to air flight and the risks they took for the sake of the future; combine that with Saint-Exupéry's account late on in the book of his own near-death experience, when his plane went down in the desert, and you have more than enough for a superb book. But this volume also contains very much more.
I still stand by my original thoughts. The only thing I'd contradict now is my declaration that I had to read the book slowly. That became impossible by the time I got to the penultimate chapter and found Saint-Exupéry and his companion Prevot downed in the desert, battling against thirst and time under the merciless sun of the Sahara. At that stage, I couldn't put it down. The only option was to race through. I didn't even break off for the glass of water I became increasingly desperate to drink while reading how the aviators tried to to gather dew drops on the cloth of their parachutes, how they felt "something rasping" in their throats, and were reduced to drinking ether even though it felt like "swallowing knives". It's an astonishing adventure.
But it's also more than an adventure. As PriyankaV wrote:
I felt that an important theme of the book was the vantage that flying provided him, both literally and metaphorically – whether it included looking down at the earth and up at the stars or the distance from people that the job entailed. It's as if he started seeing the 'bigger picture' because of the wealth of experience flying afforded him. This came out clearly when he talked about how roads fooled people before aviation.
Saint-Exupéry is asking us to look at the world at large. Richardpierce said, it's more than a book "for anyone who wants to understand what it is like to be at the forefront of discovery... It's a text that would serve well anyone studying philosophy, a book written emphatically well, containing many universal truths."
KimeCurran gives a good impression of what some of those truths may be:
It's the book I hand to friends when I know they're struggling with a decision, because to me it's a sort of handbook to finding your way in life – and not always the way that the "stifling conventions of provincial life" dictate. I've just re-read the scene on the bus, where he's watching the people who will never be able to awaken their "sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer". That always gets me.
Not only did its soaring descriptions of the freedom of flight ("the airplane is a means of getting away from towns and their bookkeeping and coming to grips with reality") inspire me to learn how to fly (I had my first lesson in August and I'm hooked!) it also was part of the reason I gave up my job in advertising (which might as well be bookkeeping) to write. It celebrates taking risks and following your heart, throwing away the maps and navigating by the stars. Put simply, it's a book that tells us how to appreciate and savour life, rather than let it pass us by. Early on, in one of so many dazzling descriptions, Saint-Exupéry shows the aviator travelling on a bus full of office workers. He is heading for a battle with the elements, with death, with the future. The bus for him is "a grey chrysalis from which that man would emerge transfigured". They are heading for the "old offices where a man's life sinks into peat". They are asleep, literally and metaphorically. Like the crowds streaming over London Bridge in Eliot's Wasteland, they are already dead. The example of Saint-Exupéry and his comrades in the rest of the book shows us how to avoid that fate: how to wake up to the world around us.
But, once more, there's more to it than that. As well as telling us how to live, Saint-Exupéry even answers why we are here in the first place. BillyMills wrote:
It is, as I said before, essentially a book about the great question 'why are we here'. It proposes one of the simple answers you'll come across anywhere, and I mean that as an absolute compliment.
BillyMills went on to explain:
St E's view of what it is to be fully human is exhilarating, but unfortunately it is extremely exclusive and I don't think it's possible to discuss the book without including both the excitement and the elitism.
This is, in a sense, part of his being 'of his time'. His answer to the 'why are we here question' is, basically, 'to fully be', but his idea of being fully is a kind of Late Romantic heroic individualism. This is why I find the whole idea of the 'craft' of flying and the concomitant guild of fliers so interesting; it's his way of assimilating the need for the communal with that individualist streak. He wants a community of heroic individuals.
I find it hard to disagree. Except, of course, there's more to the book even than that. Everythingsperfect wrote:
To me the central message of the book is (p.21 in the Rees translation): "There is only one true form of wealth, that of human contact." And I've been struck by how he emphasises this through absences. The women, who are there through the longing of the pilots. The plateau where St.-Ex. lands his plane and finds bits of meteorite in a place empty of people and powerfully illustrates how we are adrift on this planet in space, that we are all in it together. Through his use of absences St.-Ex. can make a slim, little volume resonate with the entire universe. It is if by taking away, he magnifies.
So far, so uplifting. But nilpferd reminded us to exercise caution if we think we can share Saint-Exupéry's exalted world view:
Saint-Exupéry, as has been noted elsewhere on these threads, switches deftly between the personal and the universal; so deftly, perhaps, that we miss the essential contradiction in his observations... that only someone such as himself can truly experience the wish and the opportunity to "ponder great questions" and the subsequent epiphanies which result. We profit from the insights, of course, but do we truly share his motivations in our hearts?
Perhaps, in this day and age... most of us are, after all, more concerned with building our ramparts against "wind and tide and stars" than we are with vaulting them and lauching ourselves into the unknown, in his slipstream.
When he got to the end of the book, Richardpierce also wrote:
I have now finished Wind, Sand and Stars, and cannot decide if it is a message of hope or a cry of despair.
Both, I think. Hope that the answer to 'why are we here' is so simple; despair that we are so unwilling to hear it.
Again, I'm with BillyMills – although again, there are other dimensions to explore. Part of the despair that RichardPierce sensed comes from the remarkable final chapter, Saint-Exupéry's observations on the gathering clouds of war and fearful forecasts for the future. BillyMills again:
It's interesting that the Spanish chapter, which is not at all about flying, is the climax of the book; his experience of war seems to have moved his position a bit away from the solitary and towards the communal, and that is evidenced by the sheer number of other people who inhabit, indeed dominate, that chapter. If the Prisoner of the San chapter is about his own personal brush with death, the Barcelona and Madrid one is about our communal brush with it. And maybe he's also reflecting that if humanity doesn't or shouldn't need war to make us realise that life has a purpose then equally the solitary man doesn't or shouldn't need the risks of flight to attain the same realisation.
The ultimate message in Wind, Sand and Stars then is a plea for peace: "Why hate one another? We stand together, carried along by the same planet, the crew of a single ship. If it is good that civilisations compete to promote new syntheses, it is monstrous that they devour one another."
Just what you'd expect from a man who showed such zest for life, such fascination and enjoyment for its possibilities. Yet it's also no surprise that the author of Wind, Sand And Stars died fighting the Nazis.
