Lit Matters: I Have Had to Grow Old

by Lindsey Drager

“I do not want any one to read my book carelessly,” the narrator of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince notes in the book’s opening pages. “I have suffered too much grief in setting down these memories.”

I first came to The Little Prince as a sick child who had to ensure breathing treatments three times a day because of severe juvenile asthma. The treatments were uncomfortable and monotonous, and to keep my mind occupied elsewhere, I read The Little Prince from front to back cover, over and over for years. There were multiple copies riddling the territory of my small world: one copy in the living room and one in the basement, one at my grandmother’s house and one at the neighbor’s, another in the vice principal’s office where I spent four years’ worth of recess time inhaling mechanized breath. In my mind, the book will be always linked to disorder and dread—not to healing (the work of getting well) but to treatment, to coping, the work of managing an illness with no cure.

 

TLP -- cover
The Library of Congress catalogs The Little Prince as a novella. Most U.S. bookstores categorize it as children’s literature. Originally written in French in 1943, it is one of the all-time best-selling books and has been adapted into film, ballet, opera, and theater. It is only now as I return to the book that I recognize what it really is: an object study in loss. It is part philosophical investigation, part science fiction saga, part confessional poem. It is an exercise in inscription, a report from an adult man about his meeting with a boy from Asteroid B-612, a boy who is charged with raising a rose. The man recounts to us what the boy shared with him about his tales of travel: visits with kings, alcoholics, businessmen, and geographers from across the universe, all in order to understand the meaning of being, to learn the lesson that “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

But more than any of this, The Little Prince is the story of what is lost when we become adults. It’s an allegory on the horrors of adulthood, an opaque state characterized by calcified fact. In the end, the prince is saved from adulthood; when the prince’s childhood ends, so does his life.

 

TLP -- Saddest Landscape
By some phenomenon that has no clear foundation, I grew out of juvenile asthma. I could not breathe for years, and suddenly, as my body ushered out youth, it ushered in easy breathing. By the time the treatments were no longer necessary, I had shelved The Little Prince behind thicker books and at the bottom of boxes, an attempt to forget a time in youth defined not by play but work.

“Reading is an operation without object,” Italo Calvino wrote, “or that its true object is itself.” I can’t interrogate the operation that is reading without thinking of The Little Prince, which for me, is yoked with the majesty of disorder and dread. I remember nights in bed, struggling to breathe, trying to focus and relax my swollen airways so that they would not close. I remember focusing on one strange line from the book, a line that I know now is one of the reasons I have chosen to spend most of my time within and alongside language. It is a line that crystalizes and makes kinetic everything that perplexes me about the literary arts. This is how when I was small and sick and struggling to breathe, words kept the passages from my mouth to my lungs clear. The act of reading itself kept me breathing.

Now much older—now an adult since, as the narrator puts it, “I have had to grow old”—the line takes my breath away: “Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: Is it yes or no?”

This post is part of our annual Lit Matters series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts—the mission of Lighthouse Writers Workshop— is important to them. If you agree, consider supporting Lighthouse on Colorado Gives Day. Mark your calendar for December 8 or schedule your gift now. Thank you!


Lighthouse instructor Lindsey Drager is the author of the novel The Sorrow Proper (Dzanc, 2015). She is currently an editor for Denver Quarterly and Starcherone Books and is a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver. She is teaching an intermediate/advanced memoir and personal essay workshop at Lighthouse starting in January.