I still remember doing Higher French at night school, following an early exit from secondary education, being relieved at passing it and hoping I’d never have to do French language again. But the Scottish MA requires a modern language component, so I did French Studies, which opened up a world I still explore off and on thirty-odd years on. The course included
French History from the Revolution to the present including the troubled history of the Republics, Algerian independence, failed policies in Indo China, De Gaulle and the early days of the Common Market
French Literature, in French and English translation- this was where I first read Camus – in French but cheated by reading The Plague (La Peste) also in English, because I wanted the story quicker than I could read French
French Current Affairs accessed through Le Monde on the contents of which we had several memorably embarrassing tutorials as we were asked to translate in front of les autres
We also spent time with French 20th century philosophy (mainly Existentialism) including Sartre, Camus and the writer I go back to again and again, Saint Exupery.
I still remember the first time I read Saint Exupery on flying, the desert, and the way that the courage and discipline of risk-taking is an important element of what it means to be a human being fully alive. Wind, Sand and Stars is a beautiful prose poem of human behaviour observed by one for whom the role of spectator was impossible – few writers understood and celebrated the human imperatives of action and engagement with the physical elements of existence with the passionate perception of this pilot who wrote sublime prose.
But the Saint Exupery book that I’ve read most often is Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). This fable, tale, parable, story – it defies pinning down definitions – can be read slowly in half an evening, and it opens the mind and heart every time, for me. Some of the clearest observations about the meaning of life, what’s important, what is foolish, and what is absurdly grown-up, are contained in the dialogues between the Little Prince and the pilot stranded in the desert.
“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere underneath there is a well.”
“One sees only with the heart, the essential is invisible to the eye.”
And from The Wisdom of the Sands, “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction.”
Not sure how many copies of the Little Prince I’ve bought. My first copy cost £1.25. My current aging one £2.50. The smaller one bought yesterday for a friend who will appreciate the wisdom and vision of the book cost £5.99. More than most, this is a work of art, and if French Studies had given me nothing more than an introduction to this clear-sighted French existentialist reconnaissance pilot who was able to offer a philosophy of human existence rooted in responsibility to and for the other, then it was worth all those hours and hours, working with that French dictionary, and the Larousse Illustre, and those hilarious tutorials reading Le Monde with a French tutor whose sense of humour enabled her to survive spoken French mangled by a raw and unrefined Lanarkshire accent!
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