The Little Prince
One of the central themes of The Little Prince has become my most favourite quote: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
A poetic Chinese translation is 世無雙目破塵緣，獨有靈心看通天.
(I picked up this beautiful translation from a Taiwanese magazine some years ago, but now failed to remember the exact origin.)The simple book contains lots of morals, especially to grownups who have taken many things for granted without even making an attempt to re-think them from a different perspective. The key message is that if we could look at things a little differently we would discover how ridiculous we've been behaving all along! The narrator in his boyhood failed to get any agreement from adults over the interpretation of his own drawings or his view of "matter of consequence" in life. It was consoling to see that the narrator as an adult (whose boyhood remained within) could share the feelings of the Little Prince. In the story we see how adults force their own value of "matter of consequence" into the life of the children. There are also people spending their whole lives indulging into meaningless routines and cycles like getting drunk to forget he was ashamed of drinking. Then the fox leads you to ponder if love and friendship between men are the same ridiculous. You want to ask a stranger to tame you so you become his/her friend, and you will start to love him/her, miss him/her and get into all sorts of passions and emotional ups and downs. Then the snake tells you to die is to reborn. To leave your corpus will take your spirit home. Probing a bit further, that fuzzy and whining Rose on his home planet was in fact created based on the author's wife. The author was a popular guy and had many women overseas, almost forgetting his wife who was left in Paris. Well, he finally confessed that after seeing a thousand roses in the garden, "la (the) rose" is not just "une (a) rose"!
Reflection: Forcing our own value of "matter of consequence" into the life of children
Taking kids along with us to parties, dinners and family gatherings could be embarrassing. Parents complain about their kids for being anti-socializing and failing to behave themselves. Some parents get upset because kids don't feel like joining the conservation or are unenthusiastic in responding to questions of the adults. How many times do we ask our children to stop playing with their own toys or electronic games and join the conversation of adults? Some parents even get mad with their kids for not paying attention to their auntie's questions! But why should kids be interested in our conservation? Think about it! We all do the same thing, all the times, but we never think it's an issue. Precisely we are forcing our own value of "matter of consequence" into our kids' life.
July 2009
