The Wisdom of the Sands

Rating:
Summary: Saint-Exupery's greatest book
Review: "The Wisdom of the Sands" is a collection of Saint-Exupery's very personal reflections published posthumously as a series of parables. The rhythm of his lonely, compassionate, and mystical voice in this work enraptured me. The work concludes with the most profound and moving essay on friendship that I have ever read, one that far transcends his well-known fable "The Little Prince." His reflections on loneliness will resonate with anyone who has struggled with not succumbing to despair, and who has instead found God and love and compassion at the far end of this struggle.

Saint-Exupery weaves his great love for the vast, lonely, and empty Saharan desert of his youth that he crossed many times in the 1920s pioneering airmail routes for Air France with personal reflections and understandings of the Biblical mysteries that transpired in this same corner of the earth thousands of years ago. He returned to the African desert in the last days of his life, where he was based as a P-38 reconnaisance pilot in a world that had turned ugly and that ultimately, I believe, broke his heart, based on the sad voice that resonates from these pages, one trying to make peace with the earth and with life before he dies.

This collection, along with Dag Hammarskjold's "Markings," are my two favorite books, and both are very similar in nature though distinguished by their authors' personal voices and souls and writing style. Both document the spiritual journeys of two lonely European men in this century in a very personal way. Saint-Exupery's soulful reflections on the nature of love, friendship, loneliness, community, and duty are words I turn to again and again and that have grown with me through the years and acquired new meaning as I have matured.