Precious things I learn from The Little Prince

A few days ago, I went to visit the exhibition Monet: Landscapes of Mind. In Monet’s late sixties, he suffered severe cataract. He could hardly see things and therefore fail to recognize the landscapes and colors. However, he never gave up using pictures to deliver his passion for art and beauty. Under his hazy eyesight, he captured faint images, and transformed them into splendid paintings with all his heart. Consisting of hundreds of disordered lines, his paintings seems to be hard to comprehend, but standing in front of this magnificent work, an impressive sentence from The Little Prince suddenly flashed into my mind, “Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” Then I used my heart to feel the surging emotion in these paintings, and then I saw it: the glittering sparkle hidden behind leaves; colorful vines hanging down the bridge. Art is incomprehensible to vulgar people, so are our tender hearts. However, once you close your eyes, and experience this world with your heart, you will discover that everything in this world is much more different from their surface. That is one of the great wisdom I have learned from the book The Little Prince.

In the novel, every planet-owner stands as a different kind of people in this society: the greedy businessman, the vain man who looks for nothing but fame and wealth, the king who is eager to dominate people but doesn’t know how, a stubborn but faithful lamplighter, and a boasting geographer. In our society, we all get used to the ugliness of people, but the little prince didn’t. He came up with countless questions, trying to figure out why they were so strange – so different from our definition of “humanity.” His questions also reconstruct our recognition of humanity: we are all convinced of the great Confucian idea – humans are born with kindness. However, somehow it changes with our pursuit of our selfish happiness. It becomes hard to tell right from wrong with our turbid mind, and that’s the reason why the little prince is so precious and irreplaceable – he has such a crystal-clear heart that most of us have long lost.

In the story, I like the fox the most. The suggestions he gave to the little prince are approachable but heartfelt. Making friends seems to be easy but actually difficult; however, the fox taught the little prince how to establish a bond with the one he liked. The fox told him that he should practice it step by step, getting closer little by little. In contrast to the “fast-food friendship” nowadays, to have an intimate friend becomes so cherishable to us. And when the little prince was about to leave, the fox wept. It made the little prince feel guilty, so he said, “I never wanted to do you any harm, but you insisted that I tame you.” It seems as if the little prince was a little bit irresponsible, but then the fox accepted his words, and this time the little prince felt confused. “Then you got nothing out of it?” The little prince asked. “Because of you,” The fox answered. “I truly got something because of the color of the wheat fields, which is as gold as your hair, my friend.” In any relationship, whether it is love, friendship or family relation, we always want to get something out of it. We try every effort to preserve or strive for things that could remind us of the relationship. Nevertheless, only memory could last forever, yet most of us do not realize it. It is invisible, but it stays along with us until we breathe our last. When we close our eyes, we could easily see the beautiful scenes we have once experienced, and no one could steal our memory away.

The Little Prince is one of the books that I have reviewed again and again. Every time it gives me a brand new philosophy of life, and it always reminds me of one important thing that everyone should bear in mind, just the same as the motto of Life magazine: “To find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life.”