The Little Prince

--My son and I, we watch The Little Prince.
This is the first movie I remember watching.

It stuck with me so well all these years because it sort of broke my four year old heart.

It is the earliest I remember being sad for someone outside myself.

And The Red Balloon, which they showed us in kindergarten, that’s the second film I can remember impacting me like that.

I’ve not seen either of them since them, but I remember each of them quite clearly.

Saint-Exupery disappeared in a plane over northern Africa after writing The Little Prince, the most magnificent thing, by my estimation, to come out of France.

--Sometimes I teach the book The Little Prince.

I ask my students if the story makes them cry.
Some of them admit it does.
I never tell them that it makes me cry.
They never think to ask.
They understand that my job is to dissect literature, not feel a story.

--When as a kid I'd watch a movie, usually a Western, with my father, I'd cover my head with my elbow if something made me cry.

Yes, Westerns can make you cry. Try McCabe and Mrs Miller. Try the orginal Monte Walsh. Try The Shootist.

And at the theatre, I tried to hide my head in my hood, my father asking my mother why I was crying at the ending of the White Buffalo, a movie about a killer buffalo that had to be hunted down and killed.

It was for the buffalo, my mother told my father.
And she was right.

And my father, that hunter, that taxidermist, he must have worried then tha the was raising a vegan.

--The Little Prince was the first film I remember seeing because it was the first thing I remember happening to me that didn't really happen to me.

It was the first thing I witnessed that did something to my heart.
I was four, crying into my elbow over the little prince.

--Really, what we cry for, even when we are four, it’s not the Little Prince, who falls as gently as a tree, but the pilot.

We cry for the pilot who loses the little prince. Who understands the transitory nature of the world Saint-Exupery has created, who understand that the prince must pass from this world to make it back to the rose, but who is not completely comforted by that knowledge.

Who must mourn the loss. Who must remain as one left behind.

--And later, what we cry for, when we’ve been taught to think of stories as a series of choices made by authors, when we’ve spend time studying and teaching literature and writing to the point where we never totally suspend our disbeliefs, what we cry for is the beauty of a mind able to conceive such moments.

--And so we cry together, my son and I, over something purely imagined.
This story that took place in someone else’s mind, that mind long since quiet.
We sit there with tears on our cheeks.
Hypnotized by the one devastating moment--as devestating as anything in film--the blur of the prince beneath the tree…