What I Am Reading: "Wind, Sand and Stars" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This blog post is the only survivor of a mini-arc I had intended for my post-Halloween reading progression. Based on my interest in the '30s this year and a stray comment from a Neal Stephenson interview I read years ago, I had planned to read a trio of '30s travelogues: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, Travelers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd, and this book.

However, these plans were supplanted when I found that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was far too long to properly read 1) in a library edition and 2) when I had other books in line behind it, so I decided to punt that into the new year. After I read some Weimar Republic in its place, I discovered that Travelers in the Third Reich was mainly a history of the rise of the Nazis, with much of the primary sources collected from visitor's accounts. I had hoped it was more about the visitor experiences themselves, as a chapter in Hitler's American Friends was. In any event, I didn’t want to re-cover that ground so soon, and I decided to re-purpose Wind, Sand and Stars as a period piece palette cleanser after all this fascism.

I originally found the book at the head of this list from Outside Magazine of essential books on travel and exploration, as well as taking the #1 spot on some similar lists. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, an aviator, was also familiar from his place on a favorite late-night Wikipedia standby, the List of People who Disappeared Mysteriously. In his case, the French flyer and author was lost over the Mediterranean in 1944, though his plane and (somewhat miraculously) bracelet was found underwater at the turn of the century. Amelia Earhart and Roald Amundsen patiently wait their turn.

Saint-Exupéry was an airmail pilot for Aeropostale when that was a new and swashbuckling profession, flying routes in South America and over the Sahara. He began writing about flying during his work, but this memoir, published in 1939, was his major nonfiction piece. The book does a lot of work to communicate the romance of flying from when it was a new sensation, to a reading public that could only start to conceive of it, and, unlike us today, was unlikely to ever experience it. The book is very lyrical or poetic, and consists in large part of Saint-Exupéry's philosophical musings on his experiences and observations. These are interesting when he is talking about flight, especially over the desert when mankind might as well not exist; or when he pores over the parts of the world that mankind never interacts with, as they are outside of our familiar beaten path. He talks about how intimately familiar aviators must become with minor or unnoticeable landmarks; contemplates the immensity of the universe when finding meteorite chunks in an untouched, elevated Saharan plateau (bringing slightly to mind Clark Ashton Smith, or William Hope Hodgson in The House on the Borderland). He speaks of being drawn to the otherworldly immensity of the desert; even as he has somewhat patronizing interactions with the "Moors" who live there, and discusses how conflict, including with Europeans, gives their lives meaning. When a Bedouin saves him from dehydration after a plane crash in the desert, he can remember him only nonspecifically, as "man incarnate."

This focus on the less-inhabited parts of the world is in interesting contrast to the essay (“The Aesthetics of Ascension”) I linked to when discussing that less-philosophical aviation book, Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine, about how an aerial view changed our conceptualization of the urban built environment. What Wind, Sand and Stars does have in common with that essay, however, is the ideal of the aviator as being different from the ordinary man, though Saint-Exupéry thinks that one does not have to be an aviator to live up to one's full human potential.

Sometimes I found this philosophizing to be tedious however, or muddled. It didn't help that the book was written in what I think of as a very French style, with many bon mots or dramatic asides that are not always followed up upon. This is especially pronounced in the section on a subject that I read this book to briefly escape: the Spanish Civil War. He visited Spain and toured along the Republican lines in 1936, and has a good nonpartisan marvel at the banality of “ending an entire universe” by killing a man, or how a man can fully find his place in the world by leaving his banal urban workplace to go to war. He would prefer to see people find their places in the greater scheme of things as he has, or artists or scientists have, in a nonviolent way. After all, he says, since any ideology can prove its point, there is no use fighting over ideology. This section was less impressive than it could have been, especially in light of the comments a philosopher of aviation could have had on its potential for death and destruction, as famously proven in the bombing of Guernica. It has what I regard as a failure to take a moral stand. This may come from his witnessing of the grubbier side of Republican lines, such as local reprisals against traditional leadership; but the book’s publication in 1939 would have allowed him to see the war through to its conclusion, and gather information from the other side of the lines as well.

In the end, then, it is perhaps understandable that I found this book on a list of adventure nonfiction: a genre that, however much I may like Jon Krakauer's writing, I think of as mainly being about how thrill-seeking Fight Club types separate themselves from the "sheeple" and their workaday lives. Perhaps that is an uncharitable description, but Saint-Exupéry does not charitably describe those who live their lives in the cities, "murdered Mozarts" who are not allowed to live to their full potential. I liked many parts of the book, though, and could definitely see saving some evocative and philosophical passages, on the desert and on flight, for quotation. In other words, the important half of this book is good enough for its reputation. Saint-Exupéry's criticism is not always on point, but his praise is.