Why Real Adults Wonder if There are Sheep on Asteroids
I first read The Little Prince at the end of high school and was unmoved, although I think pronounced it “charming.” At eighteen I was busy trying to grow up. At twenty-two, after a few years of wandering around the outskirts of adulthood, reading Saint Exupery’s book was a quite different experience.
The book could be dismissed as well-worn criticism of the boringness of “Grown-Ups” and the loss of childhood. But the story is really about what it means to take responsibility without losing our wonder.
A pilot is stranded in the desert and trying to fix his plane when he meets a boy stopping by Earth on a tour of the stars. The boy is from Asteroid B-612, where he keeps the volcanoes clean and tends a demanding (and talkative) rose. The rose’s annoying behavior has driven the boy to explore the rest of the universe — until he realizes that the rose needs protection from sheep and that he must return to B-612 at any cost.
It’s not a book that should be much explained — it should just be read. Trying to analyze a quotation like this would miss the point:
“for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, we not know where, a sheep that we never saw has — yes or no? — eaten a rose” (111)
The boy’s journey is about entering the world as we grow up. We start the quest of Financial Responsibility and meet the man who claims to own the stars because a contract says so (hello, NFTs), but who never enjoys their beauty. We try to be Leaders and Managers, but wonder if — like the king — our sense of control is a sham. To be well-rounded, we look for a Social Life, only to find ourselves drinking to forget with the Tipplers.
Then — hopefully not too late — we learn that what we really need is to be tamed and to tame something else. For, as an insightful fox tells the boy, to tame means to establish ties with something and recognize its uniqueness among everything else (84). We need ties and we need rituals to let the ties wear grooves into our souls that will gradually appear as wrinkles on our skin (whether from laughter or frowning is up to us). The boy has tamed the rose and let it tame him. And even though the rose is exasperating and thorny, he loves it.
For the real responsibilities aren’t on ballots, bank statements, and resumes. They’re the things we’ve tamed — not in a way that breaks the spirit, but in a way that knits spirits together so they make room for each other and trim off each other’s thorns. It’s the beautiful, needy things that we have a responsibility to even when they’re ungrateful. And so, the prince teaches us, “growing up” isn’t about ignoring what we cared about in innocence. It’s about protecting and being shaped by what we love.
