today I found
this on etsy and it made my day.
I think I've never grown out of the little prince phase, which I've been in since the time I was four years old.
I quite precisely remember the time a friend of my mother briefly told me the story of the little prince to entertain me on a long road trip. It apparently worked: I found it enchanting, and it encouraged me even more to learn how to read. shortly after I did, she sent me a copy.
after reading it for the first time, I promised myself never to become one of the adults who mistake a boa constrictor digesting an elephant for a hat and don't even think twice about it.
after all these years, I still often find myself doing the self "boa-check".
from the Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
"[....] after some work with a colored pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing. My Drawing Number One. It looked something like this:
I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.
But they answered: "Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?"
My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of a boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained. My Drawing Number Two looked like
The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."
lots of love.
