The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Saint-Exupéry Lands at Last

Those damn roses keep breaking my heart.

Put Van Halen's 'Jump' on a mixcd yesterday, a mix of happiness and crushes and sunshine. My friend Monica Taylor (the Portland one) had an Easter brunch, including limoncello on the roof.

Brought out the poi for the first time in a while, too.

Anyways, my great mood turned into a crappy mood, but that wise old man David Lee Roth still had some good words for me: 'You've got to ro-wo-wo-wo-woll with the punches to get to what's real.'

Note the odd difference in numbers between translation.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Saint-Exupéry Lands at Last: "The French pilots in Corsica knew Saint-Exupéry as a prize-winning author and a pioneer of aviation. The Americans knew him only as an outsized, overaged, undertrained wreck of a man, one who only eight weeks into his time with them mangled an $80,000 aircraft. For that mishap he was unceremoniously grounded. He begged for leniency; he was, he protested, willing to die for his country. 'I don't give a damn if you die for France or not,' Col. Leon Gray informed Saint-Exupéry, 'but you're not going to do so in one of our airplanes.' It was a case of one national treasure against another.

...He had all his life dreamed of escape, pined for broader horizons, threatened to change planets. ...

From his personal frustrations and his inability to make his political positions understood came 'The Little Prince,' the modest volume under which has swelled a great grassy knoll of literature. Published in 1943 but a best seller only later, the text read eerily as a death foretold, its mystique enhanced by the parallel between author and subject: imperious innocents whose lives consist of equal parts flight and failed love, who fall to earth, are little impressed with what they find here and ultimately disappear...

Naturally it is easier to predict your own death if you are willing to commit suicide, and for those inclined to such readings there is the mystical matter of the sunsets. The little prince lives on a planet so small that he is able to watch the sun set precisely 44 times in a day — case-clinchingly, the age of Saint-Exupéry at his death. (For some inexplicable reason, the prince witnesses 44 sunsets only in the English translation. In the original, he watches 43.) That Saint-Exupéry had no desire to go on living was clear; that he meant to kill himself is not."