A little book review: Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

A story about everything.

Dear Phoenix & Cricketers,

Writing is usually unglamorous, tedious, and frustrating. So why does any writer bother? Because they know there are wonderful things in the world, and they feel they must share the good news about those things with others. It’s like they’re the first ones to discover stars, and they’re sprinting down the street to find someone to tell. But writers are the kinds of people who find their speech often fails them, so they kick a bucket, sit down at a desk, and labor under the conviction that the right words can mean the difference between giving someone wings and sending them crashing to the earth. When I read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars, which this article is about, I found wings I didn’t know I had, and I’m here to share the good news with you. As always, I do hope you enjoy this one.

Yours,

LVWJ

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Shadow art by LVWJ.

I’m sitting at my desk in California and I’m writing in my journal. When I write and the writing is going well, it feels like what I’m doing is listening. I’m listening and I’m writing down what I hear. That’s it. There is no sound and there is no-one speaking to me. But there is something like a deep resonant humming, and the words come from the humming. Humming is not the right word for it. There is no right word for it, because as soon as I try to write about it it transforms into something new. One moment it’s a deep resonant humming and the next it’s little yellow butterfly-shaped stars fluttering all around me whispering to me in a language as old as the universe, and I’m writing down what I hear. That’s what it’s like when the writing is going well. If that sounds like a fairy tale, that’s because it is. But every fairy tale has some truth in it (after all, fairy tales spring from the same mystery void we all do), and so you’ll just have to trust me on the humming and the butterflies.

I close my eyes and I am sitting at a desk in a plank shack somewhere in the Sahara Desert. The desk overlooks the desert, and the sun is setting. It is a little wooden desk with a little stool, and on top of the desk there is a typewriter and next to the typewriter there is a pile of paper with a rock on top of it. It is just me in the shack, and outside the shack there’s a small airfield. Sometimes planes carrying mail will land here and I will take the mail that the planes carry and put the mail in the corner of the shack. But most of the time it’s just me. Wind, sand, and stars. There is no-one else, so you might think that it is very quiet and lonely, but it is not. The desert whispers to me. The whispers come from the little yellow star butterflies, who tell tales from when the desert was new, and I raise my hands to the typewriter and write down what I hear.

Then I open my eyes, and I am back at my desk in California. My vision of the Sahara from inside the shack flutters away, and I take a breath and I keep writing in my journal. I’m trying to write about one of my favorite books: Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Saint-Exupéry is the author of The Little Prince, which is one of the most well-known children’s books in the world, and which is the most translated book in history after the Bible. Wind, Sand and Stars is Saint-Exupéry’s memoir about his life as a pilot delivering mail in the Sahara. Saint-Exupéry lived in a plank shack in the western Sahara and managed a way station for the French mail service Aéropostale.

When I read a book like Wind, Sand and Stars, I feel I’m reading words written by someone who would understand what I mean about the humming and the little star butterflies. Saint-Exupéry probably didn’t think of it as humming or as butterflies, but like I said humming is not the right word for it because there is no right word for it. The important thing is that reading his words is like listening to someone who’s listening to the universe and writing down what he’s hearing. It’s the kind of writing that illuminates the infinite possible meaning that exists in everything, and it’s the kind of writing that reassures you because it lets you know you are not the only one who has ever wondered about things a certain way.

I close my eyes and I am back in Saint-Exupéry’s shack. Saint-Exupéry’s there now, and I’m watching him as he watches the little star butterflies that the desert is sending, and as he types out what the butterflies are whispering to him. This is how Saint-Exupéry is writing Wind, Sand and Stars. He is writing about airplanes and flying, but he’s writing about those things in the language as old as the universe, which means he is writing about everything. Here is one of the things he writes: ‘Space is not the measure of distance. A garden wall at home may enclose more secrets than the Great Wall of China, and the soul of a little girl is better guarded by silence than the Sahara’s oases by the surrounding sands.’

This butterfly whisper stayed with me and it changed me. It changed me because now I can never look at any mundane thing the same way again. A lonely bench I pass is now perhaps the last place two young brothers sat and laughed together, and a tree standing alone on a mountain was perhaps the only witness of a mysterious light arching across the horizon under the stars. The stories people tell about climbing to the tops of mountains are nice, but after Saint-Exupéry sent this particular whisper my way I cannot help but wonder about the story the tree has to tell. One story is not better than the other, it is just that, after reading words like Saint-Exupéry’s, meaning starts to radiate from everything like starlight and you start to see glory and honor and poetry in everything. Everywhere you stand is now the top of a mountain.

Another star butterfly flutters past in the shack, and it flutters into the pink desert twilight toward an airplane. Saint-Exupéry follows the butterfly, and I follow Saint-Exupéry. We climb into the plane and the plane takes off, and the only thing that fills my awareness is the rumble of the little plane’s engine. The rumbling fills me as my white scarf whips in the wind, and I start to wonder about things. The first thing I wonder about is the rumbling. It is as much a part of me as it is a part of the plane, and I wonder about the boundary between myself and the plane – where I end and the plane begins – and how that boundary now feels less clear.

I open my eyes, and I see what the lonely tree on the mountain saw: yellow and orange sunset light arching across the curve of the planet like a paintbrush stroke of fire, an ocean of sand stretching from forever to forever beneath me, and the first stars in the night sky. One of the stars, I’m quite sure, is a planet, or perhaps an asteroid. The words for all the things I see float into and out of my awareness. Then the words float away completely, and what remains before me is the raw physical universe. All words are gone, the wind, sand and stars merge into one, and none of it is out of place.

Saint-Exupéry grips the plane’s controls as though he’s holding the hands of a young child and the two have just finished playing and laughing together. Saint-Exupéry then glances over at me with a loving and knowing look in his eyes, and the star butterfly we followed to the plane flutters into view and lands gently on his shoulder. The butterfly whispers something Saint-Exupéry will write in his memoir: ‘The physical drama itself cannot touch us until someone points out its spiritual sense.’

This is true. I spend most of my days writing news stories about science. I am good at writing stories made of facts, but I know those facts are just a launching-off place. I know that it is not enough for the stars to merely exist for them to move you; it takes an awe of the stars to turn them into poems, just as my awe of Saint-Exupéry’s words moves me to try and write about them in a certain way.

The star butterfly then leaps into the starry twilight and leads us back to the airstrip and the shack. It is dark when we land and there are little twinkling lights in the dark by the shack, and the glowing yellow butterfly flutters over to the lights. You can see the silhouettes of people in the light, and you can hear the sounds of laughter. It’s a scene from Wind, Sand and Stars, one where Saint-Exupéry and a handful of other pilots and mechanics had to waylay for a night on a dangerous patch of the Sahara, and the group built a little protective circle out of boxes, and they lit candles.

‘Something, I know not what, lent this night a savor of Christmas,’ writes Saint-Exupéry. ‘We told stories, we joked, we sang songs. In the air there was that slight fever that reigns over a gaily prepared feast. And yet we were infinitely poor. Wind, sand and stars. The austerity of Trappists. But on this badly lighted cloth, a handful of men who possessed nothing in the world but their memories were sharing invisible riches.’

Such words give me wings and, at the same time, send me crashing to the earth. How often we must share invisible riches with others, but those riches remain unseen because most do not know how to see our riches, which often exist in that indecipherable star-humming language made without words.

I think of a passage from another memoir I love: Treat It Gentle by Sidney Bechet, who is one of the forefathers of jazz. Butterflies visited Bechet, too, I’m quite sure, and they whispered to him about the nature of jazz music. In a line from the beginning of his memoir Bechet writes about what jazz is and how it is more than meets the ear:

‘But, you know, no music is my music,’ Bechet writes. ‘It’s everybody’s who can feel it. You’re here…well, if there’s music, you feel it--then it’s yours, too. You got to be in the sun to feel the sun. It’s that way with music, too.’

To me, this echoes a line from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince wherein the titular prince learns something from a fox who has become a friend: ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’

I take a cue from the fox and close my eyes, and I see the world in colors and shapes that resist attempts to write about them. I see that what Bechet said is true: music is a light shooting through space, and the music shining from his soprano saxophone and clarinet – Bechet’s invisible riches – belongs to him and to everyone and everything it touches.

Saint-Exupéry died in 1944 when his plane crashed into the sea not far from Marseille, France as he did reconnaissance for the allied invasion of Europe at the close of World War II. I don’t know how Exupéry would respond to my thoughts about his memoir – about butterflies and what not – but when I close my eyes and turn to him smiling warmly there in the candlelight in the Sahara, he whispers something I myself wrote: ‘there is truth in every fairy tale, mon ami.’

Saint-Exupéry winks at me, then turns back to his companions, and one last star butterfly lands on my shoulder there in the desert and whispers to me that I do not need to try to write a certain kind of way to have riches to share, and I move to recap my pen and close my journal back at my desk in California.

I am learning a new way of seeing.