For wide is the gate, and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
The Holy Bible
Matthew 7:13
There was an eastern town, and an old man watched the rain from the window, his Bible on a small table beside. He sometimes wore a brimmed hat in the outdoors but only went out to get food from the grocery store. He had a little Christmas Tree, a Charlie Brown Christmas tree, small enough to go on a little table. Each year it came out. I liked this tree.
He had very few visitors but sometimes a soul would show up, someone from the old days. These people, most of them, grew up poor. It was nice that their children wanted more, wanted to succeed. There is no harm in that. But some of their children’s generation went crazy w/it, and took it all too seriously, breaking relationships, family bonds, trust, even any measure of happiness, over monetary gain. The world of others didn’t laugh outwardly at him but didn’t respect him, for his worldly accomplishments were not great or even pronounced. The affluent wanted to keep their money and get more and the poor wanted to be wealthy. The man wanted me to shave his face because he couldn’t do this any longer as he was getting shaky at ninety three years of age.
So he sat in an old chair, I think one of the very chairs I used to sit in as a child when he fed me lunch. I carefully shaved his face. Outside it rained. I could hear it against the glass and knew it was making its way into the earth here, mixing with the soil, disappearing somewhere there, but in some places went through gravity to fall down industrial grates built into the roads. He had chosen to never grow a beard. That choice in a man has always been strange to me. Though an orphan or mystery at birth in actuality, my people must have had beards, and there must be some spiritual or genetic memory of such, somewhere, somehow. But to each his own. Some people are like that, and most all people have their ideas about what is the right way to dress, to look, to speak, et cetera, and what is not. Each secretly and not no secretly thinks they are right. When I was a child he made me soup, and there were many cans of soup in the cupboard.
One day his wife said, ‘Where is the child’s drink,’ to which he replied, ‘Soup is liquid he doesn’t need a drink.’ This was a mistake. The woman scolded him and was vexed. That’s a word they used, ‘vexed.’ She said, ‘Get him a drink, and this child is never to be served a meal without a drink again.’ Time passes. He used to tell me stories of a ranch where someone is stealing in the night. But the ranch owner stayed up and watched and caught the person. It was determined the thief needed some livestock so the ranch owner gave it to him, gave him some livestock. Cormac McCarthy the old man was not. When I finished shaving the man he said thanks. He said once in those late life days, ‘It is lucky you are here.’ That was nice. I didn’t mind. His wife had long left the world and he was not long for the earth as is said.
Now, I suppose someone else lives there. Some soul or souls. That’s the way it goes. The man had fashioned his own necklace to help his soul. It was a piece of yard and on it were medallions of various Catholic Saints. And he had received the last rites two or three times, even in the days when he was healthy if elderly. One’s soul is their own responsibility in a way. I wonder if that saint necklace still exists somewhere. I wonder whatever happened to it. I wonder what happens to things, and to souls and old chairs and even cans of soup.
Antoine de Saint Exupery’s Children’s Novella The Little Prince Critically examine The Little Prince as a children’s novella by Antoine De Saint Exupery
Like The Pilgrim’s Progress and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Antoine De Saint Exupery’s historico-autobiographical novella, The Little Prince is an allegorical narrative of the innocence manifested and cherished in the terrains and frontiers of nature and humanity.
“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” Romanticization and fantasization with roses in the lamb like spirited angelic soul is literally unfathomable to the authorial autobiographical narrator. This is evidently crystal clear that P. L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins, rightly prophesied that, “The Little Prince will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam. It will strike them in some place that is not in the mind and glow there until the time comes for them to comprehend it.”
“You can’t ride a flock of birds to another planet” pontificates the assertion of the Little Prince’s cosmic odyssey from varieties of galaxies after being exiled from homeland asteroid B612. Personalities of this peregrination enlist a king’s empty domain or the hollow sham of the conceited man, a drunkard with the tremens delirium, the business tycoon’s engagement with the proprietorial starship, the extinguishing and relighting of lamppost every thirty seconds interval and finally the elderly geographer’s errand persuasive of the stately invitation to the monarch. Apart from these, the Little Prince encounters the railway switchman and the merchant. Firmament of the imagination and will-o-the-wisp reign within the fantastical narrative and thus projected as fable and parable.
That the sensitive blond stark hair, mysterious and adventuresome, precocious, charismatic angelic lamblike child is a telepathic wonderkid of dreams and castles that brings back the old memories of the gullible and melodramatic narratorial personae. Both chroniclers including the young at heart narrator aviator as well as the seraphim cherubim sophomoric little prince are preoccupied in the quest for the springwell in the sand dunes of desert canyons. The Little Prince is the embodiment of buccaneering sea pirate vessel along with the blast from the past trip down the memory lane of the aviator’s personage. Captivating and fascinating detective novella of the mainstream childrens’ literature The Little Prince encapsulates satiric penchant of allegorical fable as pontificated by the characters of anthropomorphic beasts such as the Fox.
Fox is the reincarnate of companionship, fraternity, solidarity, association, camaraderie, fellowship, closeness, amnesty, brethrenship, brotherhood, matyness, chumminess and clubbiness. Upon the sea of time little prince certainly must have been elated by the euphoric ecstasy of the rapport between this beast in want of taming: “But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat.”
This quotable speech insinuates the overtones of springtime golden harvest season being eternalized despite fugacious mendacity. Since the fox aspires to be domesticated by masterly human farmers and ultimately beseeches socialization within the anthropogenic anthropocene.
As if truth and beauty and beauty and truth allusion, a carnivorous fox pledges melodramatic rhetoric to the dumbfounded and stupefied little prince: “If you tame then we will need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.” After all, the penultimate gospel of the fox enshrines a universalistic lesson: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Absurdities, travesties, follies, blunders, idiosyncrasies are burlesqued and lampooned by the novelist of The Little Prince. Rapaciousness and avariciousness of the case study implicated the mercenary capitalistic money grubbing extortionate business tycoon. Detachment and dissociation from the reality of romance and chivalry as engendered by this materialistic acquisition of wealth and fortunes in space time travel. Furthermore drunk as a wheelbarrow is the satirical innuendo of dipsomania. Alcoholic’s drunkenness and sobriety allegorizes inward withdrawal of the slothful moron and lethargic escapist in fantasy of delusion and paranoia.
These are the gothic macabre scylla and slough of despondent charybdis from the exploratory voyages of the braggadocious inland creatures of the worldly planet. The lamplighter’s inclination epitomizing pedagogic pedantry is laconically prolific engrossment of puritanical orthodoxy embodied within the rhetoric: “There’s nothing to understand. Orders are orders.”
Sanctimonious outlook and puritanical viewpoint underscored by the sagacious allegory and sententious caricature of mankind by the observant little princes’ imago alludes to the psychic double and doppelganger of the aviator narrator. Thus the pilot of the aircraft lampoons and burlesques superficialities and travesties of humankind in the vein of the doppelganger effect.
Moreover, the solitary figure of the chronicling aviator narratorial personae is the incarnate of solitudinous solipsism, narcissistic obsession and seclusionary detachment. Candidness and frankness, outspokenness and open mindedness of the naive and gullible Little Prince are the characteristic traits that harbour the harbinger of philosophical profundity. Symbolic wonderful lamp espoused by this harbinger transcends spiritual deadliness through subversive triumphalism of Platonic idiolect: “That a life unexamined is unworthy of living.”
Since the uncluttered lovey dovey cherubic, seraphic and lamb-like cupid child, the prodigy poltergeist chronicler Little Prince condones the domain of power, fame, wealth and money as prospects yielding toward the brink of futility. Leisure and pleasure of modernity are thus let bygones by bygones at the connivance of the Little Prince. This young at heart princely juvenilia is that stellar and cosmic apple of the aviator’s eye symbolizing curiosity is the mother of invention.
Pragmatist rationalism of the quasi autobiographical narrative is reflective of the aviator’s professional and personal odyssey and/ or bildungsroman. Alienation of literal solitariness in the canyons of Sahara mirror emotional and psychological state/stance as embodied by seclusionary detachment. Elevation of lonesomeness by the gaiety and joviality of childhood roots entrenched in past upbringings nostalgic introspection. Transformation of the narratorial personae being open mindedness to the exposure of the little prince, conniving materialistic accomplishments and achievements. Melancholic and contemplative stance of the mysteries of human relationships sojourning into the trajectory from loss of innocence to the absurdist realism of the world. Protective and possessive relationship emphases real friendship. Compassion and empathy demonstrates existentialist aviator’s nostalgic yearnings as depicted by the little prince. Reckoning of wonder charismatically espouses love, relationship, fantasy, imagination, human companionship in the symbolic quest for survivalism. Cooperation and coexistence of both realistic and fantastic outlooks and points of views are essential traits explored by the novelist.
That day alone in Amsterdam, boats, bicycles, glimpses of tiny de Hooch courtyards and everywhere, tall thin houses reflected in canals, after Van Gogh, the Night Watch and many weeping Mary Magdalenes witnessing Descents from the Cross, I pass through the Red-Light District, ordinary and lethargic in daylight, elicit turning matter of fact; a few women in their windows yawn, sip coffee to begin their day; the pungent aroma of Mary Jane is pumped into immaculate alleys; on an impulse, I buy a little, fat and happy Hotei in the open-air market.
Eventually, I find the green shutters, my destination, Rembrandt’s house, and admire what he admired: seashells, swords, helmets, bones, busts and books. In his studio, it’s as if he stepped out for a moment, powdered pigments readied for grinding into walnut and linseed oils. Up the narrow staircase, on the middle floor for the group tour, a pleasant young woman inks and rolls his image through a wooden press.
In an odd tourist’s transference, we fall into a conversation over etching, Rembrandt and Amsterdam. She lightly touches my arm and offers me a generous smile and a print from the Master. I think I would very much like to kiss her, and I’m fairly certain she’d return the affection. Occasionally, I find myself missing her: we would live in a modest houseboat, skirmish over Dutch and American politics, pull prints all day from Rembrandt’s press, make love in Rembrandt’s bed. Instead, upon my return to Ohio, I send her one of my prints and, rightly so, never hear from her again.
David Sapp, danieldavidart@gmail.com
Biographical Information: David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.
