Just Finished Reading The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Little Prince, in its original French version Le petit prince, is a short 1943 novel by French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44).  The author's profession comes out strongly here as the narrator has crash-landed his plane in the Sahara Desert and only has a few days...with his water supply dwindling...to repair it.  In the middle of the desolation he encounters a young boy who identifies himself as the prince of a very small planet.  The prince asks him to draw a sheep, to which the narrator replies that his drawings have never been good since when he himself was a boy and tried to draw a snake swallowing an elephant...all the grown-ups thought it was a picture of a hand.  He does the same with this new drawing and is surprised by the boy knowing it to be a snake and elephant.  And with this the story progresses to reveal the fundamental difference in thinking between children and adults, even translating to the narrator's highly technical focus on his means of locomotion while the Prince never mentions his, as if it is inconsequential to his own thought processes.  Instead the boy from space recounts about his own home planet with its three little volcanoes, his special talking flower, and the need for a sheep to keep a planet-destroying plant from proliferating.  He travels to other neighboring small planets, each populated by a single adult with personalities and attitudes reflecting those of vast groups of adults on Earth.  The narrator's reality is dominated by science and technical details, while the boy-prince has his own reality that reflects his own assumptions such as that he just "visits" other worlds and talks with plants and animals, among other fanciful ideas that fade away with growing older.  It's a very whimsical...and a bit sad...little tale and I can see why it became so popular.  I don't think the author meant for us to forsake our own maturity and dependence on science but rather to integrate the memories and essence of our own respective childhoods into our adult being, thereby keeping joy in our lives and preventing us from becoming like those misled grown-ups whom the Prince had visited...