Goodbyes suck.
I grew up a missionary kid--I'm no stranger to change. I’ve been
through a lot of moves and transitions and said more painful goodbyes than I care to count. Some transitions are harder than others, and during one of the hardest transitions I've ever been through, someone very special introduced me to
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. It's a beautiful little children's book that I think would do a lot of grown-up children a lot of good. And it permanently
changed how I see goodbyes.
It doesn’t make them any easier, no. I don't think there's anything that can do that. But it helps
make the goodbyes perhaps even more precious amidst the pain. Every time I come to a
new transition in my life and have to say goodbyes, I bring this back
out and read it again. And the transition I'm facing right now is my biggest one since moving back to the States six years ago: I will leave my parents' house as a (hopefully mostly) self-sufficient adult this Sunday to move to the beautiful town of Staunton, Virginia to start my Master's Degree in Shakespeare and Performance.
With the move looming and several hard goodbyes already said, I thought I’d share this today. I highly recommend reading the whole novella for better context
if you’ve never read it (it’s short and it’s wonderful and everyone should),
but here are my favorite excerpts.
But it happened that
after walking for a long time through sand, and rocks, and snow, the little
prince at last came upon a road. And all roads lead to the abodes of men.
“Good morning,” he
said.
He was standing
before a garden, all a-bloom with roses.
“Good morning,” said
the roses.
The little prince
gazed at them. They all looked like his flower [on his planet].
“Who are you?” he
demanded, thunderstruck.
“We are roses,” the
roses said.
And he was overcome
with sadness. His flower had told him that she was the only one of her kind in
all the universe. And here were five thousand of them, all alike, in one single
garden!
“She would be very
much annoyed,” he said to himself, “if she should see that… She would cough
most dreadfully, and she would pretend that she was dying, to avoid being
laughed at. And I should be obliged to pretend that I was nursing her back to
life—for if I did not do that, to humble myself also, she would really allow
herself to die…”
Then he went on with
his reflections: “I thought that I was rich, with a flower that was unique in
all the world; and all I had was a common rose. A common rose, and three
volcanoes that come up to my knees—and one of them perhaps extinct forever…
That doesn’t make me a very great prince…”
And he lay down in
the grass and cried.
It was then that the
fox appeared.
“Good morning,” said
the fox.
“Good morning,” the
little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw
nothing.
“I am right here,”
the voice said,” under the apple tree.”
“Who are you?” asked
the little prince, and added, “You are very pretty to look at.”
“I am a fox,” the fox
said.
“Come and play with
me,” proposed the little prince. “I am so unhappy.”
“I cannot play with
you,” the fox said. “I am not tamed.”
“Ah! Please excuse
me,” said the little prince.
But, after some
thought, he added:
“What does that
mean—‘tame’?”
“You do not live
here,” said the fox. “What is it that you are looking for?”
“I am looking for
men,” said the little prince. “What does that mean—‘tame’?”
“Men,” said the fox.
“They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise
chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?”
“No,” said the little
prince. “I am looking for friends. What does that mean—‘tame’?”
“It is an act too
often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.”
“To establish ties?”
“Just that,” said the
fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a
hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your
part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred
thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me,
you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the
world…”
“I am beginning to
understand,” said the little prince. “There is a flower… I think that she has
tamed me…”
“It is possible,”
said the fox. “On the Earth one sees all sorts of things.”
“Oh, but this is not
on the Earth!” said the little prince.
The fox seemed
perplexed, and very curious.
“On another planet?”
“Yes.”
“Are there hunters on
that planet?”
“No.”
“Ah, that is
interesting! Are there chickens?”
“No.”
“Nothing is perfect,”
sighed the fox.
But he came back to
his idea.
“My life is very
monotonous,” he said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just
alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored.
But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall
know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other
steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like
music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I
do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to
say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think
how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also
golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to
the wind in the wheat…”
The fox gazed at the
little prince, for a long time.
“Please—tame me!” he
said.
“I want to, very
much,” the little prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to
discover, and a great many things to understand.”
“One only understands
the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand
anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop
anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If
you want a friend, tame me…”
“What must I do to
tame you?” asked the little prince.
“You must be very
patient,” replied the fox. “First you will sit down at a little distance from
me—like that—in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and
you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstanding. But you will
sit a little closer to me, every day…”
The next day the
little prince came back.
“It would have been
better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox. “If, for example, you come
at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be
happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock,
I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am!
But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is
to be ready to greet you… One must observe the proper rites…”
“What is a rite?”
asked the little prince.
“Those also are
actions too often neglected,” said the fox. “They are what make one day
different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for
example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So
Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards.
But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other
day, and I should never have any vacation at all.”
So the little prince
tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near—
“Ah,” said the fox,
“I shall cry.”
“It is your own
fault,” said the little prince. “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you
wanted me to tame you…”
“Yes, that is so,”
said the fox.
“But now you are
going to cry!” said the little prince.
“Yes, that is so,”
said the fox.
“Then it has done you
no good at all!”
“It has done me
good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.” And then he
added:
“Go and look again at
the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then
come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret.”
The little prince
went away, to look again at the roses.
“You are not at all
like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you
have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox
like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he
is unique in all the world.”
And the roses were
very much embarrassed.
“You are beautiful,
but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an
ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you—the rose that
belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds
of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she
that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered
behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars
(except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is
she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes
when she said nothing. Because she is MY rose.
And he went back to
meet the fox.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” said the
fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the
heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“What is essential is
invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to
remember.
“It is the time you have
wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
“It is the time I
have wasted for my rose—“ said the little prince, so that he would be sure to
remember.
“Men have forgotten
this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible,
forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose…”
“I am responsible for
my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
“And when your sorrow is comforted, you will
be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend.”
One runs the risk of
weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed.
If you have tamed me, you know who you are. Thank you for taming me. "It has done me good because of the color of the wheat fields."
