The Stars of Exupery

 There is a kind of law of the shortest distance to the image, 

a psychological law by which the event  to which one is subjected 

is visualized in a  symbol that represents its swiftest summing up.

                                        Wind Sand and Stars, A. de Saint-Exupéry

He fell out of the sky in 1935. 

Antoine de Saint Exupéry was born into a noble but impoverished family of Lyon, France in 1900. He became a pilot in the years between the world wars, transporting people, mail, and goods around North Africa and the Med, frequently flying over the Sahara. That desert, and its peoples, were so far from the modern hazards of life in Europe in the 1930's, that they captured his imagination and, along with his other adventures in far flung places, gave life to a series of books, rich with limpid prose, exquisite descriptions, and timeless reflections on life and love. 

It was in the Egyptian part of the Sahara that De Exupéry crashed, during a race from Paris to Saigon, in 1935. Of his many plane crashes, this one - and the 4 days that it took him and his copilot to be found - were the most influential on the rest of his life. Hope and fear, mechanics, mirages, and hallucinations, coffee and oranges, and a passing Bedouin got him out of the situation, and no doubt led to Saint Exupèry's career as a writer. 

The best loved and most widely distributed of his works is The Little Prince. It's one of those books that everyone should have read, and once read, you will probably decide to read it again. It's a short read, most people can get through the whole book in about an hour.

The planets