Wind Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Artwork by Federico Rojas

1 - Friendship

“If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon in its shade. For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us from their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old. […] there is only one true form of wealth, that of human contact.”

2 - Responsibility

“His greatness lies in his sense of responsibility. Responsibility for himself, for his mail and for the comrades who wait in hope. In his hands he holds their grief or their joy. Responsibility for that which is being newly built, down there among the living, and in which he must play his part. Responsibility to a degree for human destiny, in as much as his work advanced it. […] To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. […] It is to feel, as we place our stone, that we are contributing to the building of the world.”

3 - Intuition

“Over the desert, as in a well-kept house, a great silence reigns. But now a green moth and then two dragon flies strike my lamp. And once more I feel within me a muted emotion, […] From far away someone is speaking to me. Is it Intuition? […] What fills me with a barbarian joy is that I have grasped a secret and unspoken language, I have scented a trail like a primitive tribesman within whom all the future is foretold by such slight murmurings, and I have read that anger in the wingbeats of a dragonfly.”

4 - Isolation

“But I know solitude. Three years in the desert have taught me its taste. What is frightening is not consuming of youth out there in the mineral landscape, but the perception that far away from you the whole world is growing old. […] the good things of the earth are slipping between your fingers lide the fine sand of the dunes. In normal life men do not experience the passage of time. They live in a provisional stillness. But we experienced it with each port od call reached, feeling the force of the ever-moving trade winds.”