On Civilization : Flight to Arras
by PD Lawton 1 December 2024
As the Warlords behind Westminster and Washington use their proxy armies to sow chaos around the world and keep the public fixated on the minute and irrelevant…
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
“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
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.