Watching the world from above

As I loved Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry it is perhaps not surprising that I’ve recently been exploring other parts of his literary output. Specifically Night flight and Flight to Arras, translated by David Carter and William Rees respectively.

Night flight is focused on a South American air base and its leader during the time postal air traffic was in its pioneering and highly dangerous days. It is a fictional story but clearly inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s own experiences as a pilot in such a company. I greatly enjoyed it but not as much as I did Wind, Sand and Stars. Often I prefer fiction to non-fiction as fiction usually allows the author to write a tighter or more interesting story. However, as Saint-Exupéry do these things brilliantly in his non-fiction the fictional element in this case only made me less involved in the plot. I would also have preferred to spend more time in the air with the pilots rather than at the air base. However, I did find it interesting to follow the thoughts of the leader who sent them into danger and desperately tried to bring them safely back. Overall a very good book but far from his best.

Flight to Arras on the other hand is a non-fiction text and much closer related to Wind, Sand and Stars. However, compared to that one it is a much sadder text. Whereas Wind, Sand and Stars was focused on the dangerous but also optimistic days of early air traffic, Flight to Arras takes place in the final weeks before the French surrender to the German invasion during WW2. The mission is to all appearances both pointless and suicidal and surrender is already inevitable. Much like in Wind, Sand and Stars we get the thrilling story of the mission parallel to the author’s philosophical musings. We follow his thoughts from surly resignation of the near certain death on this likely futile reconnaissance mission to an ultimately optimistic humanitarian message as he realises which kind of future he’d be willing to die for. I prefer Wind, Sand and Stars but this one is also a great book, in its best parts equally brilliant.

I count Flight to Arras as my Travel or Journey Classic for the Back to the classics reading challenge.

 

Wind, sand and stars

I may have been somewhat unconvinced of the greatness of The Little Prince but Wind, sand and stars, also by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, more than made up for it.

The author was a pilot in the early days of air traffic and the memoir contains thrilling descriptions of these pioneering aviators and the dangers facing them. I would have loved this book for the flight scenes alone but it contains much more. Written as a collection of loosely connected essays it is partly a memoir of the early days of flying, partly a celebration of life and humanity.  In the end there is also a chapter about a visit in Spain during the civil war. It should feel disjointed but somehow the language and the love of life ties it together.

In the memoir he carefully describes the pilots, their air-crafts and the lofty world they inhabit. I especially enjoyed his description of the world below, written at a time when few people had been in a plane I imagine it must have sounded a bit like the astronauts’ descriptions of the world from space does to us.

It was written during the 1930s and his descriptions of the people he met during his time in Sahara are sometimes uncomfortable. However, unlike many of his contemporaries he had the advantage of writing about people he had interacted with and to some degree clearly respected. The result may not be a fair description of the people of Sahara but it’s probably a true portrait of how they would have appeared to a Frenchman at the time. As such I found it very interesting. I also appreciated his obvious love for Sahara, where he lived a few years, and which I felt resembled my own love for the Arctic.

All in all I greatly enjoyed this memoir and found it both thought-provoking and beautiful. I may not agree with all of his views but I found it a very worth-while read and am glad that the Classics club challenge made me discover it.

The full list of classics I have read or plan to read in the Classics Club challenge can be found here. In addition I count it as my 20th century classic for the Back to the classics reading challenge. Two other reviews of this book can be found here and here.

 

 

The Little Prince

My ambition not to buy any new books until I had read as many of my unread books as I had bought this year broke down. First I realized that I had counted some of my read books twice and thus that I was much further from my goal than I had thought and then I went to Paris and obviously had to buy some books because that’s what I do when I’m a tourist. So I have officially given up that ambition but at least I made a dent in my To Be Read piles while it lasted.

For the full tourist experience I went to Shakespeare and Company (thankfully not too crowded when I was there and thus lovely) in Paris and bought The Little Prince. It’s part of my Classics Club challenge so at least I had a good excuse (something that’s not true for all the other books I happened to buy).

The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a beloved children book, possibly even more loved by adults than by children (my suspicion). I knew it mostly from the illustrations which I really like. The text however took longer to convince me. It is in many ways a philosophical allegory, but to me it was of the kind that sounds good but doesn’t actually force you to think. On the other hand it is a children’s book so a somewhat simplistic approach is justified. It also gradually won me over and I found myself quite moved by the ending. So in the end I liked it but did not love it. It is however a quick and easy read, beautifully illustrated so it is worth giving it a chance.

 

 

More a tadpole than a fish?

I had an excellent summer for reading. No internet, few disturbances and quite a bit of rain. Thanks to these fortunate circumstances I finally read a few books I have been postponing, including “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea” (fun but not very memorable) and “Moby Dick” (excellent!).

Reading these novels next to each other I amused myself by comparing their descriptions of whales, especially cachalots (sperm whales). Moby Dick is naturally full of descriptions of whales but I was particularly interested in the following section:

“First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.

The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturæ jure meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.”

Having thus dismissed Linnæus arguments the narrator continues by defining a whale as “a spouting fish with a horizontal tail”. The truth of this statement is of course dependent on your definition of fish but I would side with Linnæus here and argue that a whale is not a fish.

In contrast we have the following description of cachalots from captain Nemo in “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea”, amusingly just after he declared the hunting of Baleen whales (unless fresh meat for the crew was needed) a “murderous pastimes”.

“Those are sperm whales, dreadful animals that I’ve sometimes encountered in herds of 200 or 300! As for them, they’re cruel, destructive beasts, and they deserve to be exterminated. […] We’ll take no pity on these ferocious cetaceans. They’re merely mouth and teeth!”

The main character in “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea”, Professor Aronnax, agrees with this assessment and adds: “The sperm whale is an awkward animal, more tadpole than fish, as Professor Frédol* has noted.” which I find a glourious insult to the world’s largest toothed whale. I already argued that a whale is no fish, the intriguing question now is whether it is also true that a cachelot is more a tadpole than a fish?

To answer that question I used science and internet, more specifically the site timetree.org which gives the time of divergence of two species, that is the time when their evolutionary ancestors separated. To test whether a cachelot is more a tadpole than a fish I searched for the divergence time of the following species:

• Physeter macrocephalus or cachelot (sperm whale)
• Rana temporaria or common frog as a representative of tadpoles.
• Gadus morhua or cod as a representative of fishes.

Fittingly all three species got their scientific names from Linnæus in his Systema Naturae (1758).

From timetree.org I learnt that the evolutionary branches of cachelot and common frog got separated around 352 million years ago, in the Early Carboniferous. Cachelot and cod on the other hand got separated already 435 million years ago, during the Silurian, and are therefore less closely related. It would thus be at least partly fair to call a cachelot “more tadpole than fish”

The more difficult question of whether a tadpole is more a cachelot than a fish I leave as an open question for the comment field.

*Le monde de la mer by Alfred Frédol. I can’t read French but based on a Google translation of Frédol’s text I believe he only described the general appearance of the cachalot when he likened it to a tadpole. Still an insult but a bit more reasonable.