On Civilization : Flight to Arras

by PD Lawton,                       24 December 2025

image: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“If you want to build a ship, don`t drum up the men to gather the wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea”-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

the following is an excerpt from Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was a French writer, philosopher and aviator. Flight to Arras is about a reconnaissance operation in 1940 during which as a pilot, he flew across Nazi -occupied France. From the air he looked down onto the villages and towns of his war torn native country and understood the meaning of mankind`s civilization

pages 52-53

“The black speck I am watching is probably a human dwelling, six miles below me. It gives me nothing. And yet it is perhaps a big house in the country where two uncles are pacing up and down, constructing slowly in a child`s consciousness something as wondrous as the boundless ocean. [ Saint-Exupéry relates a memory of his uncles during childhood]

From my thirty-three thousand feet I can take in a territory as broad as a province; but everything has contracted to the point of asphyxia. I have less space here than I had within that black dot.

I have lost all sense of expanse. I am blind to it, but I feel a kind of thirst for it. And I am in contact with a common denominator in the aspirations of all mankind.

When chance awakens love, everything around a man is ordered according to that love, and that love gives him a sense of expanse. When I lived in the Sahara and Arabs appeared in the darkness around our fires to warn us of a distant danger, the desert took on form and meaning for us. Those messengers were the constructors of its expanse. Fine music does the same, and so it is with the simple smell of an old cupboard when it awakens memories and binds them together. Pathos is in our sense of expanse.

But I realize too that nothing of what truly concerns man can be calculated or measured. A true sense of expanse is not given to the eye, but only to the spirit. Its value is the value of language, for it is language that forms and binds.

And now I am beginning to gain a clearer sight of what a civilization is. A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs and knowledge gathered slowly through the centuries, difficult at times to justify by logic but then self-justifying, like roads if they lead somewhere, in that they reveal to man his own inner expanse.

Cheap literature speaks to us of the need to escape, and of course we run away on journeys in search of expanse. But expanse is not to be found. It must be constructed. And escape never reached a destination.”

Page 122 -124

“But I ruined everything. I squandered the inheritance. I allowed the notion of Man to decay.

Yet to preserve this cult of a Prince revealed through individuals and the high quality of human relations established by that cult, my civilization had expended considerable energy and genius. Every effort of `Humanism` strained towards that goal. Humanism saw as its exclusive mission the task of illuminating and perpetuating the primacy of Man over the individual. Humanism preached Man.

But when it is faced with the need to speak of Man, language becomes clumsy, for Man is not the same as men. We say nothing essential about the cathedral if we refer only to the stones. We say nothing essential about Man if we seek to define him by the qualities of men. Humanism thus strove in a direction that was blocked from the start. It sought to grasp the notion of Man in terms of logic and ethics, and thus to convey him into our consciousness.

No verbal explanation can ever take the place of contemplation. The unity of the human Essence cannot be conveyed in words. If I wished to teach the love of a homeland or of a rural estate [Saint- Exupérywas from a land-owning aristocratic family] to men whose civilization knew no such love, no argument that I might summon would move them. An estate is composed of fields, of pastureland and livestock. Separately and together, their role is to enrich it. Yet there is in that estate something which escapes material analysis, for there are landowners whose love of their domain is such that they would ruin themselves to preserve it. It is, in reality, that `something` which dignifies the material elements with a particular quality. They become the cattle of that estate, the meadows of that estate, the fields of that estate…

Thus a man becomes the man of a homeland, of a profession, of a civilization, of a religion. But if he is to claim his place among such Essences , he must first establish them within himself. And where there is no sense of a homeland, no language will convey it. Only by actions can he create within himself the Essence to which he aspires. An Essence belongs not in the realm of words, but in the realm of actions. Our Humanism has neglected actions. It has failed in its project.

The essential action has here received a name. That name is sacrifice.

Sacrifice signifies neither amputation nor penitence. It is essentially an action, a gift of the self to the Essence in which a man will claim his part. The only man who will understand what that rural estate signifies is the man who has sacrificed part of himself to it, who has struggled to preserve it and laboured to make it more beautiful. Then the love of the estate will come to him. It is wrong to see the estate as the sum total of assets; it is the sum total of what is given.

For as long as my civilization leant upon God, it preserved this notion of sacrifice which established God in the heart of mankind. Humanism neglected the essential role of sacrifice. It claimed to convey the idea of Man by words and not by actions.

To preserve the vision of Man seen through men, , it still had only that same word adorned with a capital letter. We were in danger of sliding down a dangerous slope to an eventual confusion between Man and the symbol of the average or the totality of men. We were in danger of mistaking the sum total of stones for the cathedral.

And little by little we lost our heritage.

Instead of affirming the rights of Man through and beyond individuals, we began to speak of the rights of the Collectivity. We have seen the establishment by slow degrees of a Collective ethic that neglects Man. This ethic will explain clearly why the individual has a duty of sacrifice to the Community. It will no longer explain, without contrivances of language, why a Community has a duty of sacrifice to a single man. Why it is equitable for a thousand to die to free one man from the prison of injustice. We do still remember why, but that memory is slipping away. And yet it is above all in this principle, which distinguishes us so clearly from the anthill, that our greatness dwells.

For lack of an effective method of thought, we lost our grasp of Humanity founded upon Man, and slid towards that anthill which is founded upon the sum of individuals.

What could we offer against the religion of the State or the religion of the Masses? What had become of our great image of Man born of God? It was scarcely recognizable through a vocabulary drained of its substance.

Little by little , forgetting Man , we limited our ethical concerns to the problem of the individual. We required of each man that he wrong no other. Of each stone that it wrong no other. And certainly, when they are lying jumbled in a field they do each other no wrong. But they are wronging the cathedral which they could have created, and which, in return, would have created their significance.”