Wind, sand and stars and Saint-Ex

They found them, they found them at last.

The remains of the plane piloted by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of the beloved ``The Little Prince’’, have been found almost 60 years after his disappearance, French officials announced last week. The mystery has been solved, but more than that, there is now closure in the fascinating life of this remarkable Frenchman, this wartime pilot, aristocrat, romantic, adventurer, writer.

Saint-Ex’s life ended when he was only 44. Ah, but he lives on.

I pulled out from the shelf two of his books, ``The Little Prince’’ and ``Wind, Sand and Stars’’ (French title: Terre des Hommes). The former sure is a classic which millions of readers know by heart, but ``Wind, Sand and Stars’’ is my all-time favorite because it is Saint-Ex speaking directly, wondrously. (My yellowed copy has many pen markings on it, proof that I read and reread it a long time ago.)

``Wind, Sand and Stars’’ is a symphony, a meditation on life, spiced with true-to-life stories which are not the chicken-soup variety. Saint-Ex writes about his flights and travels to fascinating places in the sky and on land as well.

The sky is not simply a vast and empty space, it is a place where things happen to oneself and within oneself. The deserts and the fields aren’t simply there below to view from the air, they are, many times for Saint-Ex, there to crashland on, and there meet danger and beauty alone and know for the first time strange and wonderful people.

Of his crashlanding in Spanish Africa he wrote: ``But by the grace of the aeroplane I have known a more extraordinary experience than this, and have been made to ponder with even more bewilderment the fact that this earth that is our home is yet in truth a wandering star…I lingered there, startled by this silence that never had been broken. The first star began to shine, and I said to myself, that this pure surface had laid here thousands of years in sight only of the stars.’’

The desert crash site is in fact the setting of the meeting of an aviator and the Little Prince, the intrastellar boy who reveals much about himself and the planet where he came from. Well, their conversation in the Sahara has become one of Planet Earth’s bestsellers. Published in 1943, ``The Little Prince’’ has been translated into more than 100 languages (including Filipino).

The Agence France Press news story said pieces of the famous writer and aviator’s Lockheed Lightning P38 aircraft, which vanished July 31, 1944 during a wartime mission, were found off the coast of Marseille. The discovery, the news item said, was a galvanizing moment for France which had long speculated about the fate of Saint-Ex whose life and books have made him a French icon.

Born in 1900, Saint-Ex joined the French Air Force in 1921. He flew in Morocco and France, and after a brief demobilization, returned to North Africa as a member of the Air Mail Service. He later acted as a director of the Argentine Air Mail Service until he returned to Paris in 1931 and published ``Vol Nuit’’, (Night Flight) the book that established his literary fame.

Saint-Ex tried to break the record from Paris to Saigon but crashed in the African desert and nearly succumbed to thirst. This is one of his stories in ``Wind, Sand and Stars’’.

``I should never have believed that man was truly the prisoner of the springs and the freshets. We take it for granted that a man is able to stride straight out into the world. We believe that man is free. We never see the cord that binds him to wells and fountains, that umbilical cord by which he is tied to the womb of the world.’’

Saint-Ex continued to fly during World War II and when France fell, he fled to the US where he wrote three books, among them, ``The Little Prince.’’ He flew again in 1943, as a reconnaissance pilot for the US forces. On one of his flights, Saint-Ex vanished, probably shot down by the Germans. The weather was good and he had just flown out of the French island of Corsica to photograph parts of southern France in preparation of the Allied landings.

Despite his posthumous fame, Saint-Ex’s fate remained unknown for a long time, until 2000 when a professional French diver found the remains of a P38 plane off Marseille. Two years earlier a fisherman found in that area a bracelet with the words ``Saint-Ex’’ inscribed on it.

Saint-Ex’s stories in ``Wind, Sand and Stars’’ are mostly about the challenge of the elements. He had battled a tornado in the Andes and crashed in the Libyan desert. He had flown mail across the Sahara and played Scarlet Pimpernel during the Spanish Civil War. He found ecstasy in danger, in breaking bread with peasants, Arab shepherds and bedouins, in gazing at the sky with only sand for a pillow.

Through flying Saint-Ex discovered himself and this planet. ``Even the simple shepherd modestly watching his sheep under the stars would discover, once he understood the part he was playing, that he was something more than a servant, was a sentinel. And each sentinel among men is responsible for the whole of the empire.’’

Bookstores offer many new inspirational books, but nothing has captured my heart more than this old little book. Life is an adventure, a challenge, a giving of oneself for a purpose. Saint-Ex’s written works were the fruits of his zeal and zest.

We are all stardust, Saint-Ex seems to say. And he ends his awesome book with ``Only the Spirit, if it breathe upon the clay, can create Man.’’

With sweet longing ``The Little Prince’’ ends: ``Send me word that he has come back.’’

It’s Eastertide. Find time to read and feed your soul.