The Little Prince came out in 1943 in April. The Little Prince became the world's most translated non-religious book (into 300 languages) together with Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon France in 1900, and died in the Mediterranean Sea in 1944. He was writer, poet, journalist and pioneering aviator.
In the article The Strange Triumph of “The Little Prince” by Adam Gopnik in New Yorker, Gopnik's summary of the book follows: "an aviator, downed in the desert and facing long odds of survival, encounters a strange young person, neither man nor really boy, who, it emerges over time, has travelled from his solitary home on a distant asteroid, where he lives alone with a single rose. The rose has made him so miserable that, in torment, he has taken advantage of a flock of birds to convey him to other planets. He is instructed by a wise if cautious fox, and by a sinister angel of death, the snake."
And, "...the central emotions of conflict—isolation, fear, and uncertainty—are alleviated only by intimate speech and love."
And, "...Albert Camus, who also took from the war the need to engage in a perpetual battle “between each man’s happiness and the illness of abstraction,” meaning the act of distancing real emotion from normal life."
And, "The richest way to see “Le Petit Prince” is as an extended parable of the kinds and follies of abstraction—and the special intensity and poignance of the story is that Saint-Exupéry dramatizes the struggle against abstraction not as a philosophical subject but as a life-and-death story. The book moves from asteroid to desert, from fable and comedy to enigmatic tragedy, in order to make one recurrent point: You can’t love roses. You can only love a rose."
I was watching the original Star Wars, now called New Hope, that came out in 1977. After Darth Vader takes over the ship that Princess Leia is on, two androids are in the desert. I thought of The Prince. Of course they are taken up by Tusken raiders, and sold to a farmer, where they meet Luke, who travels to Obi Wan, who turns out to be an old Jedi warrior. It's a great beginning, but I wonder how conscious the existential connection to The Prince that desert was in George Lucas' mind.
I looked up B612, but only found this article from Forbes. At this moment they give you 4 articles a month, and you only have to click out of 2 adds to see the article. They ended up naming an asteroid after the fictional asteroid,
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