“You can’t love roses. You can only love a rose”: The Anti-Abstraction of The Little Prince

Here come the best three paragraphs I’ve read all week! Adam Gopnik writes at the New Yorker about one of the weirdest, most universally beloved and most enduring books in our heart’s canon, and the real reason that everyone who studies abroad as a teenager comes back earnestly quoting “What is essential is invisible to the eyes,” etc. in whatever language they have just half-learned:

The richest way to see “Le Petit Prince” is as an extended parable of the kinds and follies of abstraction — and the special intensity and poignance of the story is that Saint-Exupéry dramatizes the struggle against abstraction not as a philosophical subject but as a life-and-death story. The book moves from asteroid to desert, from fable and comedy to enigmatic tragedy, in order to make one recurrent point: You can’t love roses. You can only love a rose.

[…] The persistent triumph of specific experience can be found in something as idiosyncratic and bizarre as the opening image of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, which, the narrator tells us, the grownups can only see as a generic object. (This is where Saint-Ex and the Surrealists who admired him — a tracing of his hand appears in one of the issues of the Surrealist journal Minotaur — touch. Rene Magritte’s paintings, with their very similar obsession with middle-class hats, suggest that every time you see a bourgeois derby there may be a boa constrictor inside. The X-ray of every hat reveals a boa constrictor in every head. That could be the motto of every Surrealist exhibition.)

The men the Prince meets on his journey to Earth are all men who have, in Bloch’s sense, been reduced to functions. The Businessman, the Astronomer, even the poor Lamplighter, have become their occupations, and gone blind to the stars. It is, again, the essential movement we find in Camus, only in “The Little Prince” it is shown to us as comic fable rather than realistic novel. The world conspires to make us blind to its own workings; our real work is to see the world again.

[TNY]