The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 7

[The following is the twenty-seventh of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, and here is the twenty-sixth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The basic principle underlying the avoidance of all of the sins previously discussed is one that can sum them all up in one law.

Magic should never be used in aid of only oneself.

Use of magic with oneself as the one and only concern is what leads to all of the other sins. This is why the teaching of the Three Unities, as passed down to us from Rawmios, is so important. These unities of space, time, and action teach us our place in the world, as well as how to live well in it.

As for avoiding selfish purposes in using magic, one must focus on the unity of space, for it teaches us that we are not separate from each other, as our sense perception deludes us into believing. We are all one: everywhere is here. The suffering of one causes suffering for others, and the joy of one causes joy for others. When we can fully understand how the self is in the other, and the other is in the self, we will know the unity of space, we will have compassion for each other, and be selfless in our use of magic.

The selfish use of magic, though, leads to the Ten Errors, which deny the unity of all things. Selfishness leads to mad thinking, being dazed by images, the scurrilous use of language, all work and no rest, family fighting, murder, adultery, theft, lying, and greed.

Selfish uses of magic, as noted above, also lead to the sins warned against in the previous chapters.

Using magic in aid of all the forms of fornication makes a mockery of the unity of humanity. We are to be unified in spirit, not in body (except through marriage).

Using magic to be cruel to other people, or to animals, denies the unity connecting all of life. Kindness to each other, and to animals, restores and strengthens that unity.

Using magic to control others denies our unity with others and reinforces our illusion of separateness. Relinquishing control of others allows for the full freedom of everyone.

Using magic to start wars, or to take the land of other peoples, denies the unity of all of humanity. We must always be mindful of our common humanity, all around the world, and never regard one nation as greater than any other.

Using magic to gain excessive wealth, or to steal, denies the unity maintained between honest livelihoods and obtaining our necessities with the use of money, as elucidated among the Ten Errors. It also denies the unity of humanity between the rich and the poor, creating even greater division between men by making the rich overly luxurious and the poor wretched.

These abuses of magic, only for one’s own gain and at the expense of all other people, not only cause pain and suffering for many, but also ensure division between men, egoism, and isolation. The Echo Effect, moreover, will ensure that the pain, division, and isolation will come back to punish the sinner. Do not think they won’t come back to plague the guilty!

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 6

[The following is the twenty-sixth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, and here is the twenty-fifth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

One of the purposes of war, usually the main one, if not the exclusive one, is to steal the land from those invaded and to enrich one’s own nation at the expense of the invaded. Such a truism leads us to a discussion of the next sin.

Magic should never be used in aid of stealing, or to gain excessive wealth at the expense of others.

There are so many different ways to steal, apart from the obvious, direct forms of thievery that we usually punish the poor for committing. Yet it is the less obvious forms of thievery that are so rarely punished by lawmakers, since it is often those very lawmakers who are guilty of those indirect forms of stealing!

Even without the punishments of the state for those less-known thieves, there will be a way that those thieves will one day be punished. That punishment will come from the law of sow and reap that is the Echo Effect.

There is thievery through grand or petty larceny, there is thievery through the spoils of war, and there is thievery through the accumulation of wealth by making poor workers produce that wealth and not remunerating them in proportion to the value that they create. Not paying them enough is stealing.

The effects of this subtle kind of stealing are obvious. One need only see the stark contrast between the thieves, who live in opulence and luxury, and those stolen from, who live in filth, want, and wretchedness. A day is no longer for the wealthy than it is for the poor. The wealthy cannot be working much harder than the poor are to deserve such wealth…if the wealthy are even working as hard as the poor, or if they are even working at all.

Using magic spells that take the energy and effort of the working poor to multiply the wealth of these thieves is an especially grievous sin, making not only rich and poor individuals, but making also rich and poor families, who pass on their excess or lack from the parents’ generations to their children’s. This inheritance of abundance or want is never earned through proportionate work.

The inheritance of abundance or want is also spread throughout the world like an infectious disease. We Luminosians, enslaved by the Zoyans and yearning for liberation, must heed the warning never to take what is not ours, especially not with the aid of magic. The eighth of the Ten Errors is clear on this point. The temptation to commit this sin must be resisted. In our enslavement by the Zoyans, we have felt the sting of being punished for committing the sin. When liberated one day, we must not let ourselves be tempted to steal again, be it through direct acts of larceny, through stealing from workers, or through stealing others’ lands.

If after our liberation, we don’t heed these warnings, the Echo Effect will bring us the misfortune of being stolen from and made poor. We must not think we will be safe from such misfortunes if we ever sin again!

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 5

[The following is the twenty-fifth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, and here is the twenty-fourth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

There is one particularly wicked way to control others, and to be cruel to others at the same time. This way is through the taking away of another people’s land by use of military force, and this brings us to a discussion of the next sin.

Magic should never be used in aid of starting wars.

Now, using magic in aid of defending one’s land against invading armies, or in aid of resistance against an occupying power, is a perfectly worthy aim. We elders do not recommend, however, that we Luminosians, currently under the yoke of the Zoyans, should use magic in resistance against them. Indeed, we should not resist the Zoyans at all, for it is the Echo Effect, the law of sow and reap, that justly put us in bondage to them as punishment for our having invaded the city of Zaga and oppressed and killed their people. The Echo Effect will one day free us of the Zoyans, once our penance is complete; we must have faith in the eventual arrival of the judgement of the Echo Effect.

It is indeed providential that the name of the people who oppress us, the Zoyans, should be so similar to the name of the people we Luminosians once oppressed, the Zagans. In this similarity of names, the Echo Effect seems to be teaching us something of the law of sow and reap. What we do to others will one day come back to us, like our voices echoing back to us.

We had succeeded in using magic in aid of liberating ourselves from the Tenebrosians, as related in “Migrations,” because our bondage to those people was not a reaping of any evil we had sown. Our invasion of the city of Zaga, however, had a success that would not last because it was evil. We therefore should not use magic in aid of liberating ourselves from the Zoyans; nor should we–once we are finally liberated from the Zoyans, through the Echo Effect–ever contemplate invading, making war with, and oppressing another people, especially not with the aid of magic.

War is political murder, and murder is one of the Ten Errors as related in “Beginnings.” One must never kill or harm another, except when absolutely necessary, as in self-defence or the defence of others.

No people has the right to take land away from another people. If one people has done so, in order to mitigate the punishment of the Echo Effect, they should restore the land they stole to its original inhabitants as soon as they realize the gravity of their sin; for if they do not do so, terrible will be their loss one day!

We Luminosians, enslaved by the Zoyans, are a lesson in history, not only to the children of our posterity, but also to the peoples of all nations of the earth. If ever you invade other lands and kill their people, you will one day have your land, stolen as it is, stolen from you, and you will be killed, too! The use of magic in aid of such sins only strengthens and intensifies the sin, resulting in a harsher punishment for you!

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 4

[The following is the twenty-fourth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, and here is the twenty-third–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

There are many ways to be cruel to others, and to use magic in aid of being cruel to others; but there is one form of cruelty that deserves special attention, and so we will focus on that here.

Magic should never be used in aid of controlling others.

We have seen in Chapter Two how magic can be, and mustn’t be, used in aid of seducing others. We gave the example from the writing called “The Migrations” how a Luminosian boy used magic to seduce a girl living next to his home, and how after using her to satisfy his lust, he beat her to death when she, realizing after his magic’s power had worn off, was horrified at what he had done to her.

We repeat the same warnings again and again because they are never heeded, and we will continue to make the same warnings until they are finally heeded! Just before the writing of this chapter, another young Luminosian, among us slaves here in Zoya, used magic to help him seduce a Zoyan woman. He was discovered with her in bed, her slave, and then taken away to be put to death. Some never learn.

Seducing others is a form of controlling others. It must be stopped among us Luminosians if we are to have any hope of liberation from our Zoyan masters. They used magic to help them control and enslave us. We must not think, as some Luminosians do, that using magic to control the Zoyans and enslave them will be our revenge on them, as that boy did.

The law of sow and reap that is the Echo Effect does not come about through man’s attempts at manipulating it. The Echo Effect works of its own accord, as a direct consequence of man’s actions. The Zoyans will one day receive the Echo Effect from their own control and enslaving of us; we Luminosians, too, will receive the Echo Effect from our own control and enslaving of others!

There are those who rule a country who may use magic to control, seduce, enslave, and lie to others in order to strengthen their power. Upon the day of our liberation from Zoya, we Luminosians must resist the temptation, when founding a new nation for ourselves, to use magic to be tyrannical rulers. If we tyrannize others with the aid of magic, the Echo Effect will ensure that we one day will be tyrannized again, as we are now under the Zoyans.

Magic must never be used in aid of telling lies to others, to create false proof of lies. Heads of state may create such false events to bolster their power, or people in communities, families, places of work, or schools may do so to harm others. Such sinning must be condemned and stopped if our people are to survive, be free again, and grow. If we allow liars to use magic to make their falsehoods seem more vivid, and their illusions seem more true, then one day, the lies will come back to us all in the most convincing of illusions. The Echo Effect will make disproving those illusions impossible!

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 3

[The following is the twenty-third of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, and here is the twenty-second–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

There is the sinful use of magic in aid of indecent pleasure, and there is also the sinful use of magic in aid of inflicting undeserved pain on others. This leads us to a discussion of the second sin on the list from the first chapter.

Magic should never be used in aid of cruelty to others.

Such cruelty is not to be limited to cruelty to one’s fellow man, but also cruelty to animals, the needless destruction of plant life, or that of any form of life in our world. Killing of any kind must have justification and be necessary.

Cruelty exists in many forms, and magic can and has been used in aid of these forms. They include beatings, intimidation of the weaker and smaller, torture, murder, sexual violation for the purpose of causing another pain, the spread of lies and slanders, and many others.

The Luminosians, on the taking of Zaga and in their rule of it, were guilty of all of these cruelties, as well as the use of magic in their aid.

When Zagans tried to resist the Luminosian theft of their land, we used magic to aid us in beating them. The magic spells we used gave us greater force in our fists and the clubs we used to hit them with.

Against Zagan resistance, we also used magic in aid of intimidation. Our magic spells made us appear larger, fiercer, and more frightening to the Zagans, making them recoil and retreat.

We Luminosians would capture Zagan resistors and subject them to torture. We would use magic spells to sharpen and intensify the pain we inflicted on them, to deter the rest of them from resisting us.

Other Zagans, who tried more aggressive forms of resistance, what we called ‘terror,’ were murdered by us. We Luminosians used magic spells to murder many more Zagans than ordinary weapons could, and our spells made the deaths far more painful and slow than ordinary weapons could. This sin of ours was the true terror.

While in the previous chapter, we discussed uses of magic in the aid of using women, girls, and even animals for the sake of filthy, lewd pleasures for oneself, there is also the use of magic for such filthy and lewd use of these objects of supposed love that is meant to inflict pain. This sin was often committed by Luminosians against Zagan women and girls, as part of our intimidation and subjugation of all Zagans.

We also used magic spells to help spread lies and slanders against Zagans, calling them ‘uncivilized,’ ‘barbarian,’ ‘animals,’ and the like, in order to justify our cruelty to them. The magic spells were used on our own people, so Luminosians would never doubt the lies about the Zagans. Only a few of us had the wisdom not to allow ourselves to fall under the spells of the wicked among us.

In time, all these evils came back to us in kind! The Zoyans use their own magic to aid them in beating, intimidating, torturing, murdering, raping, and slandering us. The Echo Effect returned our sins to us. Those sins will also be returned to the Zoyans one day, freeing us finally. When that day comes, we must remember never to use magic for evil again!

Analysis of ‘First Blood’

First Blood is a 1972 novel by David Morrell. It was adapted into a 1982 movie by Ted Kotcheff, the screenplay written by Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim, and Sylvester Stallone, the last of these three of course starring as Rambo. Brian Dennehy and Richard Crenna costarred.

The film went through development hell for ten years because of such difficulties as finding the right director and cast, and getting a suitable screenplay. Morrell had sold the film rights in 1972 to Columbia Pictures; the rights were then sold to Warner Bros., and finally Orion Pictures produced the film. Another reason a film adaptation didn’t appear in the early to mid-1970s was that the Vietnam War was still going on, and film studios were worried about moviegoers’ reactions to such sensitive subject matter as that of a Vietnam vet waging a one-man war against an American town.

A suitable adaptation was finally created, to a large extent from Stallone’s rewrites, when the novel’s violence was toned down, Rambo was made more sympathetic, and he would survive in the end, which–thanks to the box-office success of the film–allowed for sequels to be made.

In fact, Morrell wrote the novelizations for Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, having informed readers in the preface to Part II to disregard the death of Rambo in his original novel. Then came two other films, Rambo and Rambo: Last Blood; all of the sequels’ screenplays were co-written by Stallone, with Morrell having no involvement in any way with the writing of the last two…though he praised Stallone’s portrayal of Rambo in the fourth film, saying Stallone had returned the character to Morrell’s original intentions as angry, cold, burned out, and filled with self-disgust.

Here is a link to quotes from the first film, and here is a link to an audiobook of the novel.

While the two sequels from the 1980s, as I said above, novelized by Morrell (fittingly, as you’ll see why below), were little more than mindless action movie nonsense, and one can basically say the same about the other two sequels, in a sense it is fitting to see Rambo in actual war situations (in Vietnam in Part II, in Afghanistan in Rambo III, in Burma in Rambo, and in Mexico in Last Blood). I say this because I see the original novel and first movie as telling a story that, while set in an American town, is an allegory of the Vietnam War, with Rambo personifying US imperialism, and the local cops representing the Vietnamese army.

Accordingly and predictably, as far as the sequels are concerned, the Vietnamese and Soviets are portrayed negatively (except for pro-US Vietnamese spy Co Bao (played by Julia Nickson) in Part II, the Soviets are portrayed negatively in Rambo III, the Burmese government is portrayed so negatively (which should not be misconstrued that I’m advocating for the junta) in Rambo as to have had the film banned in the country, and in Last Blood, Mexicans are portrayed so badly that there have been accusations of this last sequel promoting racist and xenophobic attitudes towards the country (in a rather Trump-esque vein). This sort of propagandizing against and vilifying of any country or government going against US interests is typical of imperialism.

As for the first movie, the local police of the town of Hope, Washington (in the novel, the town is Madison, Kentucky) are also portrayed negatively, with sheriff Will Teasle (Dennehy) being prickly to Rambo right from the start. Deputy Sergeant Arthur “Art” Galt (played by Jack Starrett) is abusive to Rambo to the point of psychopathy; and the other police, when chasing Rambo in the forest and getting wounded by him, cry out to Will for help like children weeping for their daddy.

In contrast, the novel’s portrayal of Teasle is much more sympathetic and nuanced, with lots of backstory to tell us the kind of world the sheriff is from. His wife has left him, so he has to deal with the pain of that. Also, Teasle is a Korean War veteran, so in that, among other things, he parallels Rambo the Vietnam vet.

Also, in the novel, Teasle doesn’t arrest Rambo (who is called only “Rambo” or “the kid”; the “John” and “James” are inventions of the movies) until after he returns to the town several times. This is opposed to Dennehy’s Teasle, who is abrasive with Rambo just upon first seeing him and not liking how he looks. He arrests him immediately for vagrancy upon Rambo’s just beginning his first return to the town.

It’s important to contrast the tone of the film with that of the novel in light of my allegorizing them as representative of American involvement in Vietnam. The film is, as I’ve said, far more sympathetic to Rambo, and far less sympathetic to the local police and reserve army “weekend warriors,” while in the novel, there’s much more moral ambiguity between the two sides.

In the film, Rambo injures those coming after him, but he never kills them, except for Galt, and even he is killed only accidentally, in self-defence. In the novel, Rambo kills many cops, and most deliberately, including Galt, who isn’t the ACAB pig of the film, but rather a somewhat inept cop who often forgets to lock the door leading upstairs from where they keep the incarcerated downstairs.

This contrast can help us understand the film’s attitude, as opposed to that of the novel, concerning the Vietnam War allegory that I see in both. The film, in having us sympathize with PTSD-stricken Rambo, as against the obnoxious local cops, takes the pro-American attitude towards Vietnam. The novel, with its morally ambiguous attitude towards both sides, allegorically takes into account how wrong it was that the US went into Vietnam and did all the damage it did there.

When we see Teasle telling Rambo, with that American flag on his jacket, to get out of town and stay out, we can see Teasle’s intolerance towards Rambo as representative of the Vietnamese not wanting any more imperialists or colonialists in their country. After all, they had just finished driving out the French colonialists by the mid-1950s, and because of Western Cold War paranoia about the ‘Red menace,’ then, by the 1960s, they had to put up with Uncle Sam moving into their country.

So the cops’ arresting Rambo, then chasing him into the mountainside forest, are allegorical of US troops taken as POWs by the Vietnamese, who then would have chased any escaped POWs in the jungles of Vietnam. Certainly in Rambo’s PTSD-addled mind, his reliving of the trauma he suffered in Nam as he flees to the forest from the cops makes the whole story into the Vietnam War all over again, from his perspective.

Seen in this light, the notion of who really “drew first blood” has a chillingly ironic new meaning.

It’s assumed by most in the West that Vietnam started the war because the “commies” were out to take over the world and ‘enslave’ everybody, so the US had to stop the spread of communism (i.e., the ‘domino theory‘) and intervene. Actually, the US lied, through the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident, to justify greater involvement in Vietnam. US imperialism and colonialism (i.e., the French) drew first blood, not Vietnam. Allegorically speaking, Rambo’s insistence on coming into town again and again (as in the novel)–defying Teasle’s insistence that he not do so (however more patient he is with Rambo in the novel, even allowing him to have something to eat in a local diner)–is what has metaphorically drawn first blood, too.

In the film, why should Teasle think that Rambo’s entering town with the American flag on his jacket, of all things, to be a sign that he’s looking for trouble? And looking the way he does, in combination with the flag (long hair, sloppy, and smelling bad), is what’s implied, of course, but allegorically speaking, it can represent a white man in Southeast Asia in a green army jacket, with that flag on it, implying a military uniform.

To make Rambo more sympathetic in the film, we see good-looking Stallone with combed hair and no beard or mustache…unlike the far shaggier and scruffier-looking Rambo of the novel. Also in the film, he is further humanized in its opening scene, in which he tries to visit a veteran friend from his team in Nam by going to the vet’s home, only to learn that he died of cancer from Agent Orange. Rambo is lonely, homeless, and suffering from PTSD. The Rambo of the novel has the same problems, but because of his tendency to kill, he’s far less sympathetic.

The issue of veterans’ PTSD, emphasized in the film, is of course a valid one, especially given how shabbily the US government has treated its veterans when they’re no longer of any use to the imperial war machine. Empire doesn’t just harm those outside the imperial core: it hurts those within it, too, and that’s why it’s valid to allegorize a vet’s war in an American town as a war in one of those Third World countries that the empire wants to subjugate and plunder.

These soldiers traumatize others and get traumatized themselves. Rambo’s loneliness represents the alienation and estrangement people feel in society and workers feel doing their work. Accordingly, while Col. Samuel Trautman (Crenna) in the film knows Rambo well (calling him “Johnny”), has personally trained him, and–as the final scene makes clear–is a father figure to him (once again reinforcing our sympathy for the US Army’s point of view), in the novel, Capt. Trautman merely headed the training facility where Rambo learned to be a soldier, he hardly knows Rambo at all, and he’s the one to put a bullet in Rambo’s head at the end of the novel.

My allegorizing of the story as one of Rambo fighting in the Vietnam War, instead of the local American cops, can be seen clearly in the novel, when shortly before Rambo’s breaking out of the police station and racing off to the forest on the mountain, he remembers a time in Nam when labouring as a POW, he gets sick, and he is given a chance to escape when the Vietnamese guards leave him to his own devices. Going through the jungle, he’s given food by local villagers, and he eventually rejoins members of the US Army.

Paralleling this Vietnam memory is Rambo’s escape from the police station, where instead of being sick, his vulnerability is from running outside completely naked (he’s just had a shower to clean away his body odour, and before he even has a chance to get dressed, he’s freaking out from a PTSD trigger from the cops’ attempt to shave his beard and give him a haircut). In the forest on the mountainside, Rambo gets clothes, food, and a rifle from an old man and a boy illegally making moonshine from a still; this help parallels the Vietnamese villagers having fed him.

Rambo is extremely averse to getting a haircut and a shave. In the novel, he’s kept in a cell that gives him claustrophobia. In the film, the sight of the straight razor gives him a PTSD flashback, making him relive the terror of a Vietnamese guard bringing a blade up to his chest and slashing it, triggering Rambo’s fight/flight response. Cutting his hair and shaving his beard, as the cops try to do in the novel, can be compared to the cutting of Samson‘s long hair, thus depriving him of his great strength. In the end, Samson kills all the Philistines, but also himself; in the novel, Rambo kills many of his enemies, and himself gets killed, too.

Having Rambo escape naked reinforces our sense of how tough he is. He can ignore public embarrassment, the discomfort of his unprotected nut-sack slapping against the seat of the motorbike as he races into the wind on it, and the possibility of scraping his skin on the ground if the bike crashes. Him naked among the trees on the mountainside also reinforces our sense of how feral he is.

Another point of contrast between the novel and the film is in who they emphasize as being the main victims of the Vietnam War. In my allegorical interpretation of the novel, Rambo’s shooting and killing of all of Teasle’s cops, as well as that of Orval Kellerman (played by John McLiam in the film) and his dogs, and on top of them, his setting of much of the town on fire suggests the American troops’ shooting and napalming of the Vietnamese and their villages. The film’s emphasis on Rambo’s PTSD, leading to him breaking down and crying at the end, as well as his never deliberately killing anyone, emphasizes how victimized the American vets felt.

Now, Rambo’s rant to Trautman at the end of the film, about how wrongly he and other vets were treated by antiwar protestors, them spitting on him and calling him “‘Baby-killer,’ and all kinds of vile crap,” is valid insofar as some troops really were innocent of such atrocities. Other troops, however, weren’t so innocent, as was the case with the My Lai massacre of 1968.

In any case, the antiwar protestors should have reserved most of their ire for the top military brass and American government. Recall that old antiwar song by Black Sabbath, which condemned the generals and politicians that plotted and started the Vietnam War, then had the poor–young men like Rambo–do all of their dirty work for them…and it was those very same poor who came home–if they weren’t killed–traumatized, unemployed, and often homeless, like Rambo; it wasn’t the generals or politicians who suffered thus.

I mentioned above how there are parallels between Rambo and Teasle in the novel, i.e., they’re both vets. Also, it’s not just Teasle et al hunting Rambo; it’s vice versa, too. Both men sustain nasty injuries in the mountainside woods, and it’s as if there’s a psychic link between the two, because later on in the novel, when Teasle is back in town, he’s had a vision in a dream that Rambo is coming back into Madison.

This time, Rambo’s going back into town to torch it all, linking this return to the other ones at the beginning, which prodded Teasle into arresting him and starting the whole conflict in the first place. This linking of going back into town, in terms of my allegory, shows how Rambo’s arrival has always been an invasion, even if he didn’t kill anybody at first. It’s like the imperialist establishment of South Vietnam (or South Korea, for that matter), a preparation for coming war and prompting the establishment of the Viet Cong.

The whole point in allegorizing the conflict in First Blood, with a US vet fighting a local American town to represent the US army fighting in Nam, is to show how imperialism’s ravaging of other countries eventually turns back on itself, causing the empire to eat itself up and ravage the imperial core. This is what we can see the Trump administration doing as I’ve been writing this post: first, they did the usual–continue to enable the Gaza genocide and Ukrainian war, and threaten Venezuela; now, they’re sending the National Guard into American cities like Washington DC, Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles to terrorize American citizens, regardless of whether or not they’re illegal immigrants, in response to an “enemy within.” When we hurt people outside, we hurt people inside (e.g., Vietnam vets’ PTSD), because in the end we’re all one.

Before Rambo goes back into town, though, he still has to hide from those doing the manhunt for him, which by now has included the National Guard and civilians. He goes deep into a mining cave, in which at first he imagines it’s like being in a Catholic Church where he can go to confession; indeed, he contemplates how he wasn’t justified in killing those cops–he could have simply escaped, but he knows that his instinct to keep fighting is powered, at least in part, by his enjoyment of killing. In his bloodlust, we can see how he personifies US imperialism.

Deep in that black pit of a cave–which in the novel, at one point shorty after he’s come back out, is aptly compared to hell–Rambo comes to a filthy chamber with toxic fumes and a floor covered in shit. Bats fly out all over him, biting and scratching him (in the film, it’s rats). He is repelled back, but he soon realizes that it’s only through this awful chamber that he’ll be able to come back out to the surface. Only by going through the darkest hell can one come back out to the light: this heaven/hell dialectic, like any dialectical unity of opposites, is something I’ve discussed in a number of blog posts before.

So in this situation, Rambo is like Jesus harrowing hell before His resurrection…though Rambo’s return to the earth’s surface will make him anything but holy.

Nonetheless, the notion of Rambo emerging from the cave as a kind of resurrected, avenging Christ is apt when we consider, in the context of my allegory, how the missionary spread of Christianity (in places like Africa, for example) has been used to justify colonialism and imperialism. Recall Ann Coulter‘s incendiary words about Muslim-majority countries immediately after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” The Western capitalist complaint about “Godless communists” would have also been used as a rationalization for fighting the Cold War in general and the Vietnam War in particular.

In any case, when Rambo comes out of that cave, he feels “good,” as it says in the novel, being the only apt word to describe how he feels. He’s full of resolve and energy, eager to fight his personal war on the town. This good feeling is comparable to experiencing the transformed, ‘spiritual body‘ of the resurrected Christ, ready to go out and fight as a Christian soldier against the ‘civilian’ pagans, or those whom Rambo fights, those without his military training and discipline.

In the film, he steals a military transport truck carrying an M60 machine gun. In the novel, he steals a police car and some dynamite. With these weapons, he’ll cause a mayhem to the town comparable to the napalm mayhem the US Army caused in Vietnam. He’ll blow up two gas stations, the police headquarters, and much of the town.

But of course, he can fight this personal war only for so long before he’ll be stopped. His inevitable, ultimate defeat is allegorical of the quagmire that the Vietnam War turned into, an unwinnable one that was beginning to be seen as such by the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the year Morrell began writing his novel.

Trautman tries in the film’s and novel’s varying ways to convince Rambo to stop fighting and thus to save his life. Allegorically, this is like the US Army’s big brass realizing that they had to pull out of Vietnam before more of their men needlessly got killed.

In the novel, Teasle and Rambo shoot each other, and Teasle–in that connection I said he has with Rambo–feels a need to be near Rambo when he’s finally killed. The police chief, a former vet, and this Vietnam vet parallel each other in their shared forms of pain (sustained injuries in the mountainside forest, alienation and loneliness [recall Teasle’s wife having left him], etc.).

The ultimate connection, though, between Teasle and Rambo is, in terms of my allegory, a dialectical one, in the sense of Hegel‘s master/slave dialectic. One can be recognized as self-conscious only through the other recognizing him as such. Rambo and Teasle react to each other at the beginning of the story. They have a fight to the death; one becomes lord, and the other, bondsman (in my allegory, these would respectively be Rambo-as-US-imperialist and Teasle-as-Vietnamese-resistor). The contradiction between the two is resolved through the efforts of the local police to stop Rambo in the end, making him realize he cannot go any further. This resolution is allegorical of Vietnam fighting so hard for many years until finally liberating themselves from Uncle Sam.

On the surface, it might seem that it’s Teasle who is the lord, and Rambo the bondsman, since it’s through Rambo’s hard fighting that he ends up outdoing the cops for so long, and escaping them; but even if we take this interpretation, it just shows how dialectically interchangeable Rambo and Teasle are, each other’s yin and yang.

Finally, what is ironic about a franchise with a seemingly indestructible tough guy is how, in this first film, the one unequivocally good one, in its climactic and emotional final scene, Rambo cries like a baby, just like Teasle’s wounded cops in the forest. Trautman comforts Rambo like a father figure (as opposed to the novel, in which Orval–the old man with the hunting dogs–is Teasle’s father figure, yet another parallel between Rambo and Teasle). The big action hero is thus a rough, tough cream puff, a Herculean masculine ideal as impossible for men to live up to as is the Marian/Aphrodite ideal for women to attain.

A scene was filmed of Crenna’s Trautman being made by Stallone’s Rambo to shoot and kill him, a forced suicide; for obvious reasons, it was disliked and excluded from the film. As I said above, in the novel, Trautman blows Rambo’s head off; earlier in the novel, wounded Rambo intended to kill himself with some of that dynamite he had.

In any case, Rambo dying at the end may not be pleasing to moviegoers who’ve invested so much time sympathizing with him, but it is the fitting end to the story, because the whole point of First Blood is how Rambo’s projection of who ‘started the fight’ is ironically how he started it (if only allegorically so, according to my interpretation); also, the whole point of the story is how it ends, with Rambo-as-US-imperialism killing many others, then self-destructing.

As of the writing and publishing of this analysis, Americans have been witnessing that self-destruction of empire on their very soil. They ought to reflect on that, and not wish for any sequels to the fighting.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 1

[The following is the twenty-first of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, and here is the twentieth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The best uses of magic, coupled with the old teachings as a guide, have been outlined in writings from before. Now, we must focus on the worst uses of magic, why they must be avoided, what the sins are behind the intentions of this worst use of magic, and the inevitable consequences of such a use of it.

These evil uses of magic have been described in some detail in previous writings, but we must warn again of these evils, and repeat the warnings many times, for so many people never heed us. We must enumerate these evils one by one and give specific instances of them, how they arise, and what results from each of them, hoping that at least some fools will think twice before using these evil spells.

A studious review of the Echo Effect, with its laws of sow and reap, as well as of the Ten Errors, the very sins that lead to the use of the evil spells, should be enough to deter any from being tempted into using the evil spells.

Magic should never be used in aid of lewdness, the enjoyment of erotic pleasure at others’ expense.

Magic should never be used in aid of cruelty to others.

Magic should never be used in aid of controlling, manipulating, or exploiting other people.

Magic should never be used in aid of starting wars.

Magic should never be used in aid of taking the land of other peoples.

Magic should never be used in aid of gaining excesses of wealth.

Magic should never be used in aid of stealing from others.

Magic should never be used in aid of oneself, to the exclusion of others’ needs.

Magic should never be used in aid of treating other people unjustly.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 1, Chapter 3

[The following is the nineteenth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, and here is the eighteenth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Part of maintaining the unity of opposites, and finding a balance between them is to respect the unity between oneself and all other people, as well as animals and plants–the Unity of Space. All life must be respected when using magic, as so it must be used for good, used selflessly.

Magic spells must be conjured with thoughts to help those in need, not to harm others. Are there many poor among you? Use magic to lift them out of poverty, not to immiserate them further.

Conjure up food for the hungry to eat with your spells. Give them water to drink: if the rivers and lakes have dried up from a drought, use magic to make the rain fall again–call on Priff, the Crim of water, for aid. If the plants have all died, your spells should make the plants grow again, to fertilize the soil–call on Drofurb, the Crim of the earth, for aid.

Are there any sick among you? Use magic to heal them and restore them, in body and mind. If you use your spells to cause sickness or death on those you hate, the Echo Effect, the law of sow and reap, will bring such sickness and death back upon you!

Are there any without learning, without the ability to read and write, or who are lacking the knowledge and skills needed for a livelihood to earn one’s daily bread? Use your magic skills to give the ignorant this learning, these abilities, this knowledge, these skills. In helping others to learn and grow, you will be helping yourself, for their knowledge and abilities will come back to you one day, to help you through the Echo Effect.

Are there many among you without homes? Use your magic to build homes for them. Are there any naked and cold among you? Do spells to clothe them and keep them warm–call on Nevil, the Crim of fire, for aid.

When you use your magic to do good for others, do not ask for anything in return from those people: ask not for gold, servitude, nor for the pleasure of a woman in bed. Wait instead for the Echo Effect to give you your reward–waiting without impatient expectation!

Any use of magic for the benefit of oneself must be done with the greatest of care. Is this benefit to oneself justified? Is it reasonable, or is it in excess? Is it a waste of power? Is it indulgent? Is it truly needed, as those uses of magic to help others are, as noted above? Or is the benefit at the expense of other people?

Is the pleasure you receive from the spell harmful to others, or eventually to yourself? Do you use it to violate a woman? Do you use it for a temporary euphoria that will become poisonous to you? Do you use magic to gain by taking from others? Do you use it to rise in power by making others fall from it? Do your spells increase your wealth by making others poor?

If you do any of these evils, the Echo Effect will ensure that you will be harmed, violated, poisoned, losing by theft, falling from power, being made poor. In using magic, use the greatest of care. Consider how the Echo Effect may turn your spell around. Will it be turned around in a way that will do you good, or will it do you the evil that you yourself have caused?

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 1, Chapter 2

[The following is the eighteenth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, and here is the seventeenth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The basic principle that must always be remembered and respected whenever using magic is that all opposites are unified: one never has one idea without its opposite. So many times did the Luminosians try to achieve one thing while being oblivious of its opposite when practicing magic, and this negligence led to so many evils for them.

This principle, the Unity of Action, is something that Rawmios tried to teach the people many years before this writing. The Luminosians were taught this idea, too, though many chose not to listen, and so they were taken into slavery not long after having liberated themselves from it.

In their attempts to free themselves from the Tenebrosians, the Luminosians used magic most carelessly: they would wildly aim their magic at the oppressors, but end up harming so many of their own in the process. This error resulted from a failure to keep in mind the Unity of Space–how all of us are unified, including even slave and master.

In their final attempt to free themselves from the Tenebrosians, the successful attempt, the Luminosians traveled and found a land they chose to settle in–Zaga, a place already inhabited by a people whom the Luminosians chose to treat with no less contempt than the Tenebrosians had shown them. This disregard demonstrated how the Luminosians had failed to understand both the Unity of Action and the Unity of Space. In oppressing the Zagans, the Luminosians failed to see their own unity with the Zagans, that of their both being oppressed peoples.

The Luminosians’ disregard of the Unity of Action resulted also in a disregard of the Echo Effect, how actions are unified in the form of sow and reap. Whatever good or evil one does to others will echo back to oneself. As we know, not too long after the beginning of the Luminosians’ oppression of the Zagans, the Zoyans invaded the settlement and made slaves of the Luminosians.

These are the bitter lessons one learns when one doesn’t heed the warnings of magic rashly used. Thus, the following laws have been devised with the hope that the practitioners of the future will not suffer the same dire consequences that the Luminosians suffered.

Magic must be practiced with a disciplined and restrained mind, ever mindful of the union of contraries. Whenever any one particular goal is sought, its opposite must be considered. To gain the love of another through magic, for instance, the practitioner must allow for the possibility that the object of his love has no regard for him or even hates him. Love must not be forced, as many Luminosian men tried to do on the women they raped and killed with their spells.

One must never practice magic with an indulgent, impulsive, or reckless attitude. That which comes quickly to the user of magic can just as quickly be taken away from him. The freedom the Luminosians enjoyed from the Tenebrosians, quickly gained, was then quickly taken away from them by the Zoyans. A lasting freedom would have been enjoyed by the Luminosians had they been patient with their magic, carefully crafting their spells to avoid killing their own as well as the Tenebrosians, and waiting to find a fertile but unused patch of land, instead of stealing land from the Zagans.

Achieving what one wants for oneself must be balanced with respecting the wants of others, for such is the essence of the Unity of Space, to see a unity in the self and the other.

The heat of the fiery passion of Nevil must be tempered with the cool calm of watery Priff. The impulsive, volatile floating and fluttering about of airy Weleb must be balanced with the stability, consistency, and surety of stony, earthy Drofurb. As mighty as the four Crims are, the misuse of their power can be deadly.

So one must be always aware of the dangers of the disregard of the Ten Errors and the Echo Effect. Never deny or forget the fundamental unity of all things. If one sees only one side of a matter, while being blind to the other, one is engaging in mad thinking, the first of the Ten Errors, which will lead to the evil use of magic.

If one is dazed by beautiful images while ignoring the unpleasant, the second of the Ten Errors, attachment to the former when using magic will lead to evil, which in turn will cause the Echo Effect to bring the evil back upon oneself.

Never use scurrilous language (the third Error) when doing incantations! Never use magic to drive others to work only, and never rest (the fourth Error)! Never use magic to provoke family fighting, murder, adultery, theft, lying, or greed (the rest of the Ten Errors)! The Echo Effect will bring all of these sins back on the sinful user!

Analysis of ‘Le Petit Prince’

I: Introduction

Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) is a 1943 novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the US that year, and published posthumously in France following liberation, as the Vichy Regime had banned it.

The novella was Saint-Exupéry’s most successful work, selling about 140 million copies worldwide, and thus being one of the best-selling books in history. It’s been translated into over 505 different languages and dialects worldwide, second only to the Bible among the most-translated works. Le Petit Prince has been adapted into many art forms and media, including audio recordings, radio plays, live stage, film, TV, ballet, and opera.

Here is a link to quotes from the novella in French and in English translation, and here is a link to a PDF of an English translation of the story.

II: Chapter One

Saint-Exupéry begins his tale by discussing a time, when he was six years old, that he was fascinated with how a boa constrictor eats its prey, swallowing it whole without chewing it, and needing six months to digest it. The boy decided to draw a boa constrictor having swallowed an elephant, but on showing the picture to some adults and asking if it scared them, they saw nothing scary about it, since it looked as if he’d simply drawn a hat!

In this moment, we see the beginning of a recurring theme in Le Petit Prince: the folly of adults when compared to the wisdom of a child. The boy tried a second drawing, this time showing the inside of the boa constrictor so the elephant could be clearly seen. Now, the adults advised him to forget about boa constrictors and what they eat, and instead focus on learning geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. The folly of adults is the reversing of what’s important and what’s unimportant, so Saint-Exupéry gave up on the dream of being an artist at the age of six and would eventually become a pilot instead.

In meeting more adults over the years, he never changed his low opinion of them, since as a test, he’d show them his first picture, and they always saw only a hat.

III: Chapter Two

Here is where the story really begins, a fanciful rather than a logical one. Adult Saint-Exupéry had been living alone, with no one to talk to (loneliness is another major theme of the novella), until six years before his telling of his story, when he was flying his plane over the Sahara Desert and it crashed with a broken engine. Again, he found himself alone, with no passengers or mechanics to help him.

He had to fix his plane alone, he was miles away from civilization, and he hadn’t enough drinking water to last a week. This was a life-and-death situation. You can imagine the stress he was going through.

This predicament really happened to Saint-Exupéry and his copilot-navigator, André Prévot, in 1935. Though they’d survived the crash, they faced rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat, with limited food and drink. They both began to have vivid hallucinations. By the fourth day of their ordeal, a Bedouin on a camel found the two and saved them. Saint-Exupéry described their ordeal in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes).

The notion of having hallucinations while suffering in the desert heat can explain Saint-Exupéry seeing the little prince. While the boy is, on the one hand, a projection of the pilot having regressed to a childhood state (to ease his stress), the prince can also be seen as a Christ figure, a sinless child coming to Saint-Exupéry’s rescue, just in time.

One idea that you can glean from all of my posts involving my interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros (i.e., the dialectical relationship between opposites) is that at the moment of the most hellish despair, salvation can come. The prospect of certain death in the desert (hell, the bitten tail of the ouroboros) leads to Saint-Exupéry’s delivery from it (heaven, the biting head of the serpent). This delivery, this salvation, comes to the beleaguered pilot in the Christ-like form of the little prince.

If adult Christ was King of the Jews, then as a child he was a prince, the Prince of Peace, the little prince. We are instructed that we can attain the kingdom of heaven only as a child (Matthew 18:3), and so Saint-Exupéry must get back in touch with his original, naïve childlike nature. This is the purpose of the little prince entering the pilot’s life right at this moment…saving him in the most unlikely way.

On the morning of the second day of Saint-Exupéry’s ordeal, he wakes up to the voice of the boy asking him, of all things, to draw a sheep for him. The importance of this seemingly trivial, frivolous request, interrupting the man from his urgent work, exists on several levels. First, there’s the dialectic of prioritizing the trivial over the urgent, a child’s wisdom versus an adult’s. Second, the sheep makes us think of a lamb, the Lamb of God. Third, the man is being brought back to his childhood love of drawing…but drawing a peaceful, rather than a threatening, animal.

What makes the pilot’s ordeal in the story even worse than that of Saint-Exupéry and his copilot, Prévot, in the real-life ordeal is precisely the absence of a copilot, or anyone else, for that matter. The man is alone in the hot desert, far away from civilization, with a plane needing repairs, and he’s running out of drinking water. He could die, and he has nobody with him. This is the hell of death and loneliness.

Being alone only intensifies annihilation anxieties, leading one all the closer to psychotic panic, or what Wilfred Bion would have called a nameless dread. The pilot is sweltering in oppressive heat; this heat is an example of unpleasant stimuli that Bion would have called beta elements, stimuli that have to be processed, via alpha function, into alpha elements, or processed stimuli that one can cope with. (Read more about Bion’s and other psychoanalytic concepts here).

As I said above, the extremity of the pilot’s ordeal has forced him to regress to a childlike state, to a simpler frame of mind that doesn’t have to cope with complexity. Still, though, that complexity has to be coped with, and in his regressed, childlike state, the pilot needs someone to help him process the physical irritants (beta elements, the dehydrating heat) that he can’t deal with all alone. It’s out of the question, of course, that his mother could be there for him, the one who normally does the vicarious processing of her baby’s unpleasant stimuli via maternal reverie. The pilot must resort to something else.

As a result of his helplessness, loneliness, and urgent need to save his life, the pilot projects his inner child out into the external world in the form of the little prince, who is for the pilot what Bion would have called a bizarre object, a projected hallucination from his inner psychic world, sent out of him to keep him company in a desperate attempt to save his life.

With the bizarre object of the little prince come all the other bizarre objects: the tiny planets of the boy and the men the boy visits, the talking rose, the talking fox, and the talking serpent. This childlike fantasy world is the pilot’s escape from his desperation, his ordeal.

Getting him to draw a sheep several times, criticizing each drawing for this or that flaw, and finally accepting a drawing of a sheep ironically obscured in a box, are ways of helping the pilot process his childhood trauma of his original artwork having been rejected by adults. Had he only been encouraged to be an artist as a child and thus to express his emotions freely, he might have pursued that ambition, instead of becoming a pilot (symbolic of trying to fly away and escape everything), and thus finding himself in his current, life-threatening predicament. On a symbolic level, his danger in the desert represents his psychological crisis resulting from having abandoned and betrayed the true self (in Winnicott‘s sense) of his childhood. In this sense, the little prince has truly saved the pilot.

IV: Chapter Three

We get a sense of how small the planet is that the little prince comes from when he tells the pilot that the sheep he’s given him won’t need a rope to restrain it, since if it strays, it won’t be able to wander very far.

The smallness of the little prince’s planet–like that of the planets of the king, the vain man, the drunk, the businessman, the lamplighter, and the geographer–has different levels of meaning. On the one hand, it means the planets are like small islands in a universal ocean, isolated places of loneliness and alienation. Thus, they represent projections of the pilot’s loneliness as well as the loneliness of all of us. The small planets also represent a wish-fulfillment for a man stranded on a stretch of land far too large for his comfort. If only he, like the little prince, could fly away from his world to explore others and escape his danger, taken away with the help of a flight of migratory birds (Chapter Nine), instead of being stuck in a desert with his broken-down plane.

V: Chapter Four

Indeed, the little prince’s planet is as small as a house!

The pilot believes the boy’s planet is an asteroid known as B-612, discovered by a Turkish astronomer in 1909, whose discovery was ignored by the International Astronomical Congress because the Turk wore the traditional clothing of his country rather than European clothes. When the Turk was in European clothes, though, and he presented his discovery to the Congress again in 1920, the Westerners acknowledged him. We see in this an example of both Western prejudice as well as the addled adult mindset.

The pilot notes more examples of this mindset, in how adults seem to think that numbers and figures pertaining to anything are more important than, say, its beauty. These numbers and figures, of course, often represent monetary values for the adults: ‘Does his father make much money?’ or ‘I saw a house worth a million dollars […] What a pretty house!’ Such a mindset is a reflection of the capitalistic values we’ve all been taught, and so Saint-Exupéry’s critique of such values must have been among the reasons that the pro-Nazi Vichy government wouldn’t allow Le Petit Prince to be published. Fascism is hyper-capitalism: it exists to thwart the growth of socialism–more on that later.

Now that the little prince is out of the pilot’s life (it’s been six years, as of the telling of this story, that the little prince has returned to his planet), and so not only does the man miss the little boy, but he has revived his childhood interest in art, having bought a box of paints and some pencils, and not wanting to be interested in only numbers. He is getting older physically, but the return of the little prince to his planet really means, paradoxically, that the projection of the pilot’s inner child has returned to his heart.

VI: Chapter Five

In this chapter is a discussion of the issue of baobab trees. As soon as the little prince is aware of the growing of a bad plant like a baobab on his little planet, he must destroy it at once. For if he allows any baobabs to grow freely, they will take over his entire planet and the roots will burrow their way down. And on a small planet like his, the baobabs will wreck it entirely.

Researchers have contended that the baobabs represent Nazism’s attempt to dominate and destroy our Earth. Small wonder the Vichy government wouldn’t let Saint-Exupéry’s novella be published, and only upon France’s liberation from Nazi occupation would the story be published there.

Note that it isn’t enough to uproot this or that baobab, and then be content that one’s work is all done. The little prince tells the pilot that one must regularly go to work, every day after washing and cleaning, spotting the baobabs and distinguishing them from the similar-looking rosebushes, and pull the baobabs out as soon as they’re spotted as such.

The same vigilance must be applied to fascism…though few have heeded the warning since the end of WWII. The defeat of Nazi Germany, more the sacrifice of the Soviets than of Western Europe and North America by a long shot, was merely a setback for fascism. The far-right soon regrouped and acted clandestinely, seeming no different from the rosebush-liberals of the postwar world.

Ex-Nazis found lucrative employment in the US via Operation Paperclip, for no one was more effective at fighting ‘those lousy commie Reds’ than fanatically anti-socialist fascists during the height of the Cold War. These ex-Nazis worked in NASA, NATO, and West Germany, causing tensions in East Germany that necessitated the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, also known as the Anti-fascist Protection Wall, to keep Nazi espionage out, as well as to prevent brain-drain, or the loss of skillful engineers, scientists, etc. to the capitalist West through tempting salary offers.

Then there were Operations Aerodynamic and Gladio.

After all of that fascist terrorizing of the European left came the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the use of Ukrainian fascists by the US and NATO to provoke Russia into a needless and dangerous war, and the rise of Trump via Zionists like Biden. This is why we can never stop being mindful of baobab fascism.

But I digress.

Saint-Exupéry may have been born to an aristocratic family, but that doesn’t necessitate elitist, let alone fascist, sympathies. Peter Kropotkin was a Russian prince; he was also an anarcho-commmunist. Friedrich Engels was a bourgeois; he was also Karl Marx’s trusted friend and colleague.

But I digress again.

VII: Chapter Six

The little prince loves to watch sunsets, which on his tiny planet come forty-four times a day! Here on Earth, though, the boy will have to wait and wait.

The frequent sight of sunsets (and therefore also of sunrises) implies that the little prince has a far more conscious sense of how cyclical life is than we do. He watches sunsets when he is sad, implying that they have a therapeutic value for him. Seeing the coming darkness will bring to mind that the light will soon return.

We on Earth, on the other hand, must wait much longer for both the light and the dark, giving us the illusory feeling that both the good and the bad are closer to being permanent states of existence. The boy knows better, though.

VIII: Chapter Seven

The little prince wants to talk to the pilot about flowers, and if the sheep will eat flowers, but the pilot is terribly busy and stressed trying to repair his plane. The boy’s incessant questioning feels so annoying in its triviality.

When the boy asks what a flower’s thorns are for, the man snaps at him that it’s because flowers are cruel, which the prince can’t believe. The pilot’s words seem to imply that the little prince is being a cruel flower himself for pestering him in his life-or-death situation.

The boy is shocked that the man doesn’t think flowers are important, and that he is being just like any other adult, bereft of understanding. Recall that the little prince, as a Christ-figure, is trying to get the pilot to understand that, in order to save himself, the pilot must be as a child, to be an imitator of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), and therefore in agreeing that flowers are important the man is imitating the prince and being like a child.

The little prince speaks of a man on a planet he’s visited who thinks that doing sums is the only important thing in the world; this man has never smelled a flower or looked upon a star. He’s swollen with pride, like a balloon. He sounds like the businessman we’ll learn about in Chapter Thirteen, he who imagines all the stars out in space are his possessions, his accumulated wealth. If so, he counts the stars, but never looks on them. In other words, he has all the inverted values of a capitalist. He doesn’t care about beauty; he only cares about numbers as money-values.

The pilot feels ashamed to seem like a man similar to this businessman.

IX: Chapter Eight

The little prince tells the pilot about a special seed that was blown onto his planet from some other place. It gave birth to a new kind of shoot, making the prince look it over very closely. Was it a new kind of baobab? No.

It grew into a beautiful flower that captivated the boy’s heart. She was a speaking flower, and one that is rather vain, her words annoying him. She wanted him to attend to her needs–watering her, and putting a screen around her to protect her from gales. He feels that one shouldn’t listen to flowers, but rather just look at and smell them, and admire their beauty.

Apparently, the flower, a rose, was inspired by the author’s wife, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, who was from El Salvador, the country that inspired the little prince’s planet, with three volcanoes like those in her country, too (including the Santa Ana Volcano). I suppose we’re meant to assume by all of this that his wife was kind, yet petulant and vain as well.

The little prince’s leaving his planet and the rose behind, later to encounter the vast field of roses on Earth, is meant to represent Saint-Exupéry’s infidelity to Consuela, presumably during his travels by plane. In all of this, we can see again how the little prince is a projection of the pilot’s idealized version of himself, and is therefore also in turn a projection of Saint-Exupéry.

X: Chapter Nine

The little prince has left his planet, apparently, with the help of a flight of migratory birds, obviously symbolic of a plane for Exupéry to fly, and therefore a wish-fulfillment for the man stranded in the desert. The leaving can also represent the loss of innocence upon having grown up and having to face the adult world.

Before leaving, though, the boy’s had to be responsible and make sure his planet has been left in the best condition possible, which meant cleaning his three volcanoes, two active and one extinct, as well as pulling out the last of the baobab shoots and making sure his rose was safe from harm.

She says she won’t need the glass dome he’s used to put on her to protect her. She’ll enjoy the cool night air, and her thorns will protect her from any wild animals. Just as he is maturing and getting more responsible and self-reliant, so is she.

XI: Chapter Ten

In his travels in space, the little prince visits a number of asteroids not unlike his own in essence. The first of these has a king on it, and every other asteroid also has a solitary man living on it, each man in his own way demonstrating the foolishness of the adult mindset.

This adult absurdity is put into full effect here with a king who, all alone on his asteroid, rules over nobody. We see what a bad thing authoritarianism is when it’s presented in an absurd way. The king’s commands are pointless, illogical, and unenforceable. Quite an ironic position to get from an author who was born into an aristocratic family.

If the king can’t forbid the little prince to yawn, then he’ll command the boy to yawn. If the prince is too shy to yawn, then the king will command him sometimes to yawn, sometimes not to.

The king wants respect for his authority, and hates to be disobeyed, yet he is consummately ineffectual, thus demonstrating all by himself just how invalid regal authority is.

If the boy asks the king if he may do something, such as to sit down or ask a question, then the king commands him to do these things instead of simply permitting him to do them. The king is alone on his asteroid, yet he insists he rules over everything, even the stars, which he imagines must obey him in everything. In a while, we’ll be introduced to the businessman, who imagines the stars are his property.

The king says that authority rests on reason, and that he demands obedience because his orders are reasonable…yet the examples given above demonstrate how his orders are anything but reasonable.

The little prince wishes to leave the king’s little planet, yet the king forbids him to, offering to make the boy his minister. There being no one else on the asteroid, though, means that he as “minister” will have no one to judge. The king says the boy then can judge himself. The insists on leaving, yet the king offers to make him his ambassador. The prince leaves.

XII: Chapter Eleven

The second planet the little prince visits is inhabited by a vain man, who imagines the approaching boy to be an admirer. The prince considers the vain man’s hat to be an odd one, yet its owner says he raises it to anyone who praises hm…yet no one ever comes to his planet.

The vain man asks the little prince to clap his hands, which the boy does, causing the vain man to raise his hat “in a modest salute,” as if he were receiving applause for having put on an impressive performance.

The vain man, like the king, is demonstrating the absurdity of adults’ narcissistic affectations of greatness, when no such greatness is at all in evidence. He asks the boy if he thinks him “the handsomest, smartest, richest, and wisest man on the planet”…yet he is the only man on the planet, just as the king is alone on his planet, ruling over nobody.

Adult narcissism seems to stem from loneliness.

The prince leaves the planet.

XIII: Chapter Twelve

He arrives on a planet where a drunk lives. The little prince learns that this man drinks to help him forget how ashamed he feels…because he drinks!

The sadness of the drunk drives home the idea that it’s the loneliness of all of these adults that drives them to do the absurd things that they do. Hence, each man lives alone on his planet. The boy was alone on his, too, yet at least he had the sense to leave and look around, to find people.

Accordingly, he leaves the drunk’s planet, too.

XIV: Chapter Thirteen

The little prince arrives on the planet of the businessman, who is in the middle of doing sums. We see here especially how numbers are meant to represent monetary values, as I mentioned above, since the businessman is counting the stars.

He imagines he owns them simply because he was the first to think about owning them. He sees a difference between his owning them and a king ruling over them; we could see in this ‘difference’ a satirizing of the difference between capitalism and feudalism.

The businessman imagines that his ‘owning’ of the stars will make him rich…so he can ‘buy’ more stars! The little prince notes that the businessman’s avarice is based on the same kind of circular reasoning as the drunk’s shame is based on. One gropes for things only for the sake of groping for them.

The notion of justifying one’s ownership of a thing on the basis of having ‘discovered’ it is extended by the businessman into the realm of imperialism and settler-colonialism. He says, “When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours.” We all know what happened when Christopher Columbus discovered land that “belongs to nobody.”

The businessman’s ‘discovery’ of the stars, those islands in the sea of space, and his subsequent ‘owning’ of them, amassing his wealth through them, is the author satirizing capitalism by demonstrating the absurdity of accumulating capital for its own sake, claiming ownership of things that don’t belong to you.

He justifies his ownership of the stars further by calculating their totals, writing the totals on a little piece of paper, and putting the paper in a drawer to lock them in. This locking-away of the paper is his “bank.”

Like the king, the vain man, and the drunk, the businessman is all alone on his planet, engaging in his absurdity to compensate for his loneliness. The alienation caused by capitalism, fittingly, is felt most keenly by him. He pays little attention to anybody or anything other than his calculating.

The little prince observes that his own ownership of volcanoes and a flower are far more meaningful because he actually tends to their needs. The businessman, on the other hand, does nothing of use for the stars, just as any capitalist does little more than accumulating profits and overseeing those he overworks and underpays, his workers, who are the ones who are actually making the products and who thus should manage themselves and earn the full fruits of their labour.

The little prince leaves the businessman’s planet.

XV: Chapter Fourteen

The next planet the little prince comes to is one inhabited by a lamplighter. This planet is the smallest of them all, with only enough room for the lamplighter and his street lamp.

This man doesn’t seem to be engaging in absurd acts on first inspection, though, as has been the case with the previous four men, for lighting a street lamp does in itself have meaning. Still, his work is discovered to have plenty of absurdity in it.

The lamplighter’s planet is so small, and it has been rotating faster and faster over time, that morning and evening fall almost immediately the one after the other, so he must light up and put out the street light with hardly any rest in between.

And why? Because these are his orders.

Still, the boy sees good in the lamplighter, for “he cares for something besides himself.” The lonely little prince could also see a friend in the lamplighter, yet sadly, his planet is too small for both of them to live on, so the little prince leaves.

XVI: Chapter Fifteen

The next planet he lands on is one with a geographer, an elderly man who writes long books and imagines the approaching boy to be an explorer. Recall that geography has been one of the pilot’s studies, so when we discover the geographer’s absurdities, we will see another example of our narrator poking vicarious fun at himself.

One would think that this geographer would have an encyclopedic knowledge of every nook and cranny of his little planet, but he knows of no oceans on it, nor of any mountains, cities, rivers, or deserts. The reason for his ignorance, he says, is that he has no explorers to discover all of these things for him. He is only supposed to receive the explorers’ information, ask them questions about it, and write it all down.

Considering the little prince to be an explorer, the geographer is eager to hear the boy describe his planet. The prince tells of his volcanoes and his flower, though the geographer is not concerned with the latter, since it is “ephemeral.” Geography books are concerned only with what lasts forever on a planet, the geographer insists.

Similarly, he is not concerned with whether a volcano is extinct or if it lives. What matters to him is the mountain itself, which does not change. If the geographer records changing things in his books, then they’ll be out of date, sooner or later, and he can’t have that.

The little prince is saddened to learn that that which is ephemeral is “that which will die.” Since his flower is ephemeral, he fears for her death. In his heart, the boy knows better than the man: that which will die is far superior to that which is “everlasting,” since the ephemeral’s value is its rarity in the brevity of its life.

The geographer recommends that the little prince go next to the Earth, since good things have been said about the planet. So Earth is where the boy goes.

XVII: Chapter Sixteen

Ours is no ordinary planet, for instead of having only one king, one vain man, one drunk, one businessman, one lamplighter, and one geographer, there are many hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and/or millions of each of these kinds of men on Earth. So many adult fools, all occupying one planet.

The narrator discusses the many lamplighters of the world before the invention of electricity.

XVIII: Chapter Seventeen

The narrator notes, yet again, another absurd thing that people often do: they lie to sound smart. While he acknowledges that people occupy very little space on Earth, grownups will think he’s lying about that, since they in their pride would prefer to believe that they take up a great deal of space here. “They think they are as large as baobabs.” As I discussed above, we should all know what that kind of poisonous pride can lead to.

When the little prince arrives on Earth, he’s surprised to find no people at all. Well, he is in the middle of a desert, after all. On a planet with so many people, the boy is still lonely.

He soon finds himself in a conversation with a snake. Since as a Christ-figure, the little prince could thus be a kind of second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:47, for example), then it is fitting that he have a conversation with a ‘second serpent’–not one that will tempt him (via Eve) into sin and death, but one that will give him genuine knowledge and wisdom.

The boy learns from the serpent that, while it is surely lonely to be in the desert, “It is also lonely among men.” One could be surrounded in a sea of people, yet still feel lonely if one doesn’t have any friends. Many people here on Earth have that experience. The boy’s encounter of many, each living alone on his own tiny little planet, is symbolic of that loneliness, isolation, and alienation we all feel, at least from time to time. The absurd behaviour of those men on their asteroids can be seen as at least representative of trauma responses to their loneliness.

The serpent says other things to suggest his links with the Biblical one. He says he’s “more powerful than the finger of a king”, suggesting he’s in a way like Satan, the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). He also says, “Whoever I touch I send back to the dust that created them” (Genesis 3:19). This is a good serpent, though, and he won’t hurt the little prince, for he is pure and comes from a star. He is concerned about the boy, and he can help him.

XIX: Chapter Eighteen

The little prince walks across the desert and finds a flower with whom he has a conversation.

He asks the flower where the people are, but the flower has once seen a caravan go by, and it believes there are only six or seven people, all blown about by the winds, so who knows where they are. The people’s lack of roots “causes them many problems.”

That’s what we need: roots to hold us in place!

XX: Chapter Nineteen

The boy goes up to the top of a high mountain. Before, he knew only his three tiny volcanoes, going up just to his knees. He imagines he’ll be able to see the entire planet from this tall mountain, but he can see only “sharp, craggy peaks.”

He calls out, and hears only an echo for his answer. To hear only himself is like meeting the pilot, a lonely mirror of himself.

XXI: Chapter Twenty

This is the chapter in which the little prince, as I mentioned above, encounters a garden of roses. These roses look just like his flower, the one he left on his little planet. He’s saddened by how their likeness to his rose, his true love, makes her no longer unique, but common. He sees five thousand roses here!

Recall how I mentioned above that his flower represents the author’s wife, Consuela, and that these many flowers represent his extramarital affairs. Consuela, incidentally, had affairs of her own, which I suspect Saint-Exupéry knew of, or at least suspected, hence she, like the many roses here, must have seemed disappointingly “common” to him.

Since the little prince is an idealized version of Saint-Exupéry, then the replacement of the women in his life with flowers is an attempt to smooth over and mitigate his sins, as well as those of Consuela. We see, in the weeping of the little prince over his “common rose,” a touching moment revealing how, in spite of Saint-Exupéry’s naughtiness (and Consuela’s), he still loved her.

XXII: Chapter Twenty-one

As the little prince has been weeping, a fox appears. The two have a conversation, and the boy, feeling lonely, wishes to play with the fox.

The fox insists, however, that the prince tame it first. By “tame,” it means that the boy must “make a connection” with it, thus they would need each other, and be unique to each other. The boy thinks of his rose, and he tells the fox he thinks she’s tamed him. In this taming, it is apparent that his rose became “unique” to him…unlike now.

The fox doesn’t like its dull life because all it does is hunt chickens and is hunted by men, each of both types being all identical, lacking uniqueness, and thus their lives are boring; but if the little prince could tame the fox, then its life would be so much better. The boy’s and the fox’s lives would have meaning, because taming would make them connect with each other, and give each other uniqueness.

The little prince says, however, that he hasn’t the time to tame the fox, for he must look for friends and try to understand the ways of the Earth. The fox says it would be better to tame and be friends with it, for people, having no time for understanding, would rather buy things in shops. One cannot buy friendships, so people don’t have friends anymore…what a trenchant comment on how modern capitalism causes alienation.

To tame the fox, the boy will have to be very patient. Since ‘taming’ in this story essentially means making friends with others–calming down their wildness and making them civil with you–we see how important patience is in building relationships…a skill we have been losing more and more as we fetishize commodities in the shops mentioned above. It’s easier to have things than it is to have people, and to have people have us.

“Words can cause misunderstandings,” says the fox, which is part of why having patience in relationships is so hard.

And so in taming the fox, appearing for it at regular times and thus making it happy, the little prince has made friends with it and made it unique, not like a hundred thousand other foxes. Similarly, his rose is unique because of its taming, so it isn’t like all those other roses that seem so common. Because of this understanding, he can feel good about his rose again. One imagines that, in real life, this understanding must have helped Saint-Exupéry to reconcile himself to his wife, in spite of their troubled marriage.

We see most clearly through our hearts, the fox tells the little prince. Seeing through the heart must be the basis of a child’s wisdom, while seeing through the eyes seems to be the basis of an adult’s folly. What’s more, the boy’s rose is important because of the time he’s spent with her, the taming process.

The fox is believed to have been inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s intimate New York City friend, Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, and she is the one who apparently gave the author the wisdom of seeing clearly with one’s heart. It’s ironic that the source of some of the novella’s wisdom, if it’s the true source, came from a paramour.

XXIII: Chapter Twenty-two

Next, the little prince meets a railway signalman. As the trains race past from one side to the other, the boy wonders why they’re in such a great hurry, to which the man answers that even the passengers don’t know why. The prince asks if the passengers were unhappy where they were before they took the train, and the signalman tells him, trenchantly, that one is never happy wherever one is; in other words, traveling anywhere will never bring happiness–one cannot find it by merely going out there…one must be content where one already is first. The little prince might well have just stayed on his planet with his rose. Oh, the folly of the pilot’s many flights!

One interesting point that the railway signalman makes is that the adult passengers are following nothing, just sleeping during the train rides, while it’s their children who have their faces pressed against the windows. The boy notes that only children know what they are looking for, implying the folly of the sleeping adults, who have let their sense of curiosity wane.

XXIV: Chapter Twenty-three

The little prince meets a merchant who sells small smart pills that can quench one’s thirst. If only the pilot were here! The little prince would use the time saved by taking the pills to go to a water fountain.

XXV: Chapter Twenty-four

As of this point in the boy’s telling of his story to the pilot, the latter has used up all of his drinking water. He is desperate, in his stress, to get water and repair his plane, so he has no use of the boy’s stories!

Since the little prince mentioned going to a water fountain, fortuitously just in time, rather than indulge in the hallucinatory wish-fulfillment of taking one of the merchant’s water-pills (whose saving of time is a further wish-fulfillment, alleviating the pilot’s anxiety about urgently finding water), he simply takes the pilot to look for such a fountain. They search until night falls, and thirst is making the man a little feverish.

At one point, the little prince remarks about how beautiful the desert is, and the pilot must agree. Then the boy says that the beauty of the desert comes from how a well is hiding within it.

The pilot has an epiphany on hearing this second observation. He realizes that what makes anything beautiful–a house, the stars, a desert–is something that stays invisible, hidden.

The boy falls asleep, and the man carries him. He realizes how valuable the little prince is. He looks at the boy and understands that what he sees is just a shell, but that what’s important about the little prince is invisible, hidden.

We see with our hearts, not with our eyes.

The little prince has tamed the pilot, who is no longer frantic about fixing his plane, and is patient in his growing thirst. Instead of being lonely, the pilot has a friend…if only a hallucinated projection of himself. He and the boy are unique to each other. The pilot understands that relationships are more important than things.

And it is at this point, at daybreak, when he has discovered, at last, a well.

XXVI: Chapter Twenty-five

The little prince seems to be recalling his conversation with the railway signalman when he says that people go on trains without knowing where they really want to go. They go in circles and get frustrated. It isn’t worth it. As I said above in my comment on Chapter Twenty-two, it doesn’t matter where one travels if one doesn’t have happiness. Was it worth the trouble for the boy to leave his planet? Have any of the pilot’s plane trips been worth it, if he’s been so lonely?

When they operate the well to draw water from it, the boy says, “The well is now awake, and it is singing.” He wishes to drink, too, but he’s always aware of beauty before his material needs.

As the boy drinks, the pilot comes to understand what the prince has been looking for: not just the nourishment of the water, but also forming bonds with people while seeking such material needs, and appreciating beauty along the way.

The little prince gets a picture of a muzzle for his sheep, drawn by the man so the boy’s flower will be safe from being eaten when he returns to his planet. Then the pilot must return to his plane and finish repairing it; after that, he must go back to the boy, as he in turn had to do to the fox, for this is part of being tamed: remembering your relationships with others.

XXVII: Chapter Twenty-six

The pilot returns to see the little prince, who is sitting on the top of a dilapidated old stone wall, with his feet dangling from it. The pilot notices that there is a yellow snake at the foot of the wall, one that could bite and thus kill the boy in less than thirty seconds. The prince tells it to go away, so he can get off of the wall. The pilot is getting his pistol out to shoot the snake, but it slithers away quickly.

He wonders about the boy speaking with snakes, but instead he learns that the little prince knows he has repaired his plane. So he can go home…and so can the boy.

The pilot knows already that he’ll miss the little prince when he is gone. He longs to hear the boy’s laugh. The prince has given the man so much wisdom; the boy has reawakened the child in the pilot.

Because of the child, the man has a way of valuing the stars that other adults haven’t. For scientists, the stars are trouble; for the businessman, they are wealth. For the pilot, because he knows the little prince is among them, the stars laugh for him.

The boy has given him the gift of happiness, of friendship, and of the end of loneliness. He doesn’t want to leave the prince.

XXVIII: Chapter Twenty-seven

Six years have gone by since the little prince left Earth.

Since he forgot to draw a leather strap for the muzzle for the sheep, the pilot wonders if the sheep has eaten the rose. Perhaps it’s safe, protected under its glass dome…or maybe there’s been an occasion when the boy has forgotten to put it on the rose, and the sheep has eaten it!

Whether the sheep has or hasn’t eaten the flower, everything changes if the answer to this question is yes, and this is important in a way no adult will ever understand, for it’s about caring deeply about a child’s happiness.

Saint-Exupéry ends his tale by twice drawing the spot in the desert where he met the little prince, and also where the boy left him. Thus, it is both the happiest and the saddest place in the world for the pilot.

Recall what I said in my commentary on Chapter Two, about the ouroboros, and that the head biting the tail represents where extreme opposites meet in a dialectical sense. In this instance, I mentioned heaven and hell: back in that chapter, hell led to heaven, the stress of facing certain death in the desert led to the pilot’s encounter with the Christ-like little prince; by the story’s end, though, happiness has led to sadness, in how the pilot has experienced a kind of enlightenment through the boy, and yet now he deeply misses the boy’s company.

After Buddhist-like enlightenment, the pilot feels himself thrown back into the samsara of attachment, wanting his little prince back. He thus asks his readers, if they should see the boy there in the desert, to let him know of the boy’s return, to comfort him.

XXIX: Conclusion

The complexities of life, the songs of innocence and of experience, make us adults forget the simple truths we knew as children: be kind to people, help those in need, appreciate friendships, weed out the bad things before they get worse, and prioritize what is beautiful over material gain. Don’t let pride turn you into a fool.

Thus it makes perfect sense that Saint-Exupéry wrote a novella, to remind adults of the above values, in the form of a children’s story.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, France, Editions Gallimard, 1946

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