Friday, January 4, 2008

The Great Mystery


WE READ Antoine de Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince every evening in Baja, finally finishing it up last night at home.

The midriff of Baja with its towering cardons and curly boojums, the devastatingly beautiful rocky isolation, and, this year's surprise, eruptions of early wild flowers, pockets of yellow and red fringing the road and the boulders, resembles, in some ways, the Little Prince's planet, Asteroid B-612.

Here then, is a great mystery. For you who also love the little prince, and for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, we do not know where, a sheep that we never saw has – yes or no? – eaten a rose…

Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: Is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes…

And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance
!
At this, the end of the book, my little guy turned over, snuggled down in the blankets and announced that he believed that the sheep had not eaten the flower and promptly, oh so quickly, you know how they do, fell asleep.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

back just in time to evcuate, huh, reb?

Rebel Girl said...

So it seems!

Anonymous said...

OMG I want to be in that kayak!

torabora said...

There is a beautiful photo of a similar kayak on the net where the kayak is being shadowed by a giant Great White shark.

Rebel Girl said...

No great whites in the Sea of Cortez.

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...