“The grown-ups are very strange…”
-The Little Prince
Oh Antione –
scraping the depths of human reason
with naught but your hands,
you bring up from the deep
the simple gift of worth.
Matters of consequence mean
naught to matters of heart;
thus spake your golden-haired angel
to one who’d forsake the roads
of virtue and beauty.
To the hapless soul who met
your Little Prince upon the desert sands,
you dissolved the false mantel of pride
he wore about his shoulders so piously,
never knowing what truths he missed.
You gave the pilot wings on which
to travel the realms of simpler planes of thought,
that, no less complex than matters of consequence,
should teach us more about ourselves and life
than numbers, figures, and objects of material.
These values you taught us:
Take not seriously words spoken without import;
they glimmer and glow when first uttered,
but their light fades and their fire burns, quick,
leaving nothing but dead ash behind.
Never run from your doubt;
journey till your travels yield to you what you need to know,
to understand what you need in order to return.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you;
one must require from each only the duty they can perform.
But don’t require from someone
things you have no need for.
Pay no attention to the vain, for the vain pay none to you -
nor do they lend an ear when it would be
the most helpful to another than he.
Substituting a problem
to overcome another problem,
does nothing but add to your problems.
Take pride in what you have.
Appreciate the value in what you have.
But leave the unobtainable where it lies,
if it truly cannot be claimed by you.
That which is beautiful in meaning
is truly useful.
Beauty can be found in many places;
don’t judge value by what you see, but rather
by how it may be applied.
Knowledge is nothing without experience.
Even when the mind has knowledge of the experience,
it cannot possibly substitute for what is felt through the body itself…
…and you always know less than what you think you know.
Don’t overlook values;
only through experience and reflection
can you truly learn about the world and yourself.
“Hold fast to your friends,” your Little Angel spoke,
“not everyone has had a friend before.”
Friends may come in the strangest of guises,
but it is not guise which makes a friend,
it is love and need.
Friends shed new light on old shades of life,
add new depth to old memories,
dredge fresh love where old love glossed itself over.
But most of all a friend will fill you,
and not leave you beautiful and empty.
“It is only with the ear that one can see rightly;
what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
After blessings of friendship were breathed into a newly-met stranger,
your Little Prince ascended back to Heaven in a flash of yellow,
so much like the hair on the wise head of the young boy,
so much like the golden scarf that graced his youthful neck.
And with that he passed away from this world,
this hellish world of material needs,
and returned to his things of beauty, his life of meaning.
And we are most grateful to you, Little Prince,
for showing us just how grand life can be.
“…Children, watch out for the baobabs!”
--January 29th, 2004, Drama 252 Response Paper: “The Little Prince”
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