Night Flight

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

created: 2023.02.03. 09:06 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

Suddenly, he must have felt as though he were strolling slowly through the stillness like a shepherd.

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From time to time, after crossing hundreds of kilometers of grassland even more deserted than the sea, he would come upon an isolated farmhouse. It looked like a boat carrying human lives, swept backward through the rolling waves of grass. Then he would tilt his plane’s wings in greeting. ch.1, p.16

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The radio operator thought that somewhere in the sky a thunderstorm must be lurking, like a worm inside a fruit. ch.1, p.17

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Fabien felt tired as he slowed his engine on the approach to San Julián. Everything that softens human life—houses, little cafés, trees by the roadside—grew steadily larger as he drew near. ... Even in poverty, people manage to live with a generous spirit. From now on, he wanted nothing more than to live simply, gazing through a window at an unchanging view. Even a little town like this would do. For once a person has chosen a place, they learn to love it, content with the chances life brings their way. ch.1, p.18

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Now, like a night watchman, he discovers the human lives the night reveals: their calls, their anxieties. That modest star glimmering in the darkness is a solitary house. When its light goes out, the house shuts itself inside its love. Or inside its worries. It ceases to communicate with the world. Those farmers seated before a lamp at the table do not know what they long for. They do not know that their longing reaches this far into the vast night.

But Fabien discovers their longing when, after flying a thousand kilometers—his plane bucking as if alive in violent turbulence, crossing ten thunderstorms like battlefields and passing through the moonlight that shines between them—he approaches each of those lights with a sense of triumph. Those farmers think their lamp illuminates only a humble table. But from eighty kilometers away, it looks like a light waved desperately out to sea by someone on a deserted island, and he is moved by its call. ch.1, p.22

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How agonizing was the mournful song of the mail plane, hurled like a blind arrow into the curtain of night! ch.6, p.50

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In life, only stones had been gentle with him. ch.6, p.51

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Perhaps all Leroux’s greatness lay in his homely appearance, which had led him to devote his life entirely to work. ch.6, p.51

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This sleeping city offered him no protection. When he rose into the sky like a young god, stirring up dust, the city’s lights would seem futile. ch.10, p.78

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He smiled.

‘Soon I’ll be far, far away from this city.... There is beauty in departing at night. Pull the engine lever toward the south, and in less than ten seconds the landscape changes; you’re flying north. Then the city is nothing but a deep sea.’ ch.10, p.81

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He thought of the pilot.

‘I am freeing him from fear. It is not him I have attacked. Through him, I have attacked the pressure that paralyzes a person when faced with the unknown. If I listen attentively to his story, sympathize with him, and take his adventure seriously, he will come to believe he has returned from a mysterious world—and that mystery is the source of his fear. He must descend into that dark well and climb back out able to say there is nothing there. He must descend into the very heart of night, into that dense darkness, without even a miner’s little lamp to illuminate his hands or the plane’s wings. He must put a shoulder’s breadth between himself and the unknown.’ ch.11, p.87

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Rivière countered.

“It is a matter of life and death for us. Every night, we lose the advantage over rail and sea transport that we gained during the day.” ch.11, p.88

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In any case, everything would be decided in this deep darkness. ⋯ Between him and the sun lay a night so deep he could not escape it. ch.12, p.97

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Failure makes the strong stronger. Unfortunately, though, we are gambling with human lives in a game that scarcely takes account of what events truly mean. On the surface we win or lose, gaining some paltry score. And then we find ourselves bound to that superficial defeat. ch.13, p.99

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“Mrs. Fabien would like to speak with you, sir.”

‘There it is! What I feared has finally happened!’ Rivière thought. The emotional side of the drama was beginning to emerge. At first, he refused to acknowledge it. Mothers and wives do not enter operating rooms. On a ship in danger, feelings must be kept in check. They do nothing to help save anyone. ch.14, p.109

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An undertaking, even the building of a single bridge, destroys individual happiness. Now Rivière could not help asking himself, ‘By what right?’ ‘The crewmen who may now disappear could have lived happily....’ He seemed to see their faces, bowed in the golden sanctuaries lit by evening lamps. By what right had he drawn them out of those sanctuaries? By what right had he taken them away from their private happiness? Wasn’t protecting that happiness the first law? Yet he, too, was destroying it. Those golden sanctuaries are fated to vanish one day like mirages. For age and death destroy that happiness more ruthlessly than Rivière himself ever could. Perhaps there is something else to save, something more enduring. Was it to save that part of humanity that Rivière did this work? If not, his actions could not be justified. ch.14, p.112

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An ancient leader might have felt no pity for human suffering, but he would have felt immense pity in the face of human mortality. Not pity for the death of each individual, but pity for the human race, like sand swept away by the sea. And so, perhaps, he led his people into the mountains to erect stone pillars that the desert could not bury. ch.14, p.114

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He felt he could still fight, still try his luck. There was no fate imposed from outside. But there was a fate within. It came the moment a person recognized his own weakness. Then every possible mistake swept over him like vertigo.

At that very moment, through a gap in the storm above his head, a few stars glittered like bait in a deadly trap.

He was certain it was a trap. Three stars appeared through an opening; you climbed toward them, but afterward you could no longer descend. You had to stay there, biting into the stars.

But his longing for light was so great that he climbed anyway. ch.15, p.119

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‘Smiling? I must have gone completely mad. We’re lost.’

Yet he had been released from an unfathomable, obscure power. The bonds that held him had fallen away like the handcuffs of a prisoner set free for a moment to walk alone among flowers.

‘How beautiful it is.’ Fabien wandered among stars packed close as jewels. There was nothing living there but Fabien and his companion—nothing at all. He felt like a thief in an imaginary city, trapped in a chamber of jewels from which there was no escape. They had become immensely rich, yet they wandered among those cold jewels under a sentence of death. ch.16, p.123

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Rivière thought of Fabien’s hands. Hands that, for a few minutes more, would hold his fate at the controls. Hands that had caressed. Hands that, resting on someone’s breast, had stirred it like the hands of a god. Hands that had rested on someone’s face and changed its expression. Those hands that worked miracles. ch.18, p.127

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“Listen, Robineau. There are no solutions in life. There are only forces that drive us forward. We must create those forces, and the solutions will follow.” ch.19, p.129

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‘We do not ask for things to last forever; we only wish not to see an action or an object suddenly lose its meaning. At that moment, the emptiness around us is laid bare....’ ... ‘And it is through such things that death comes to us. ...’ ch.19, p.134

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“Be careful. It’s night, remember!”

He did not hear his colleague’s warning. With his hands in his pockets and his head thrown back, facing the clouds and mountains, rivers and sea, he began to laugh quietly. It was a faint laugh, yet it shook his whole body like a breeze stirring a tree. Faint as it was, it was stronger than the clouds, the mountains, the rivers, and the sea.

“What is it?”

“That fool Rivière.... He thinks I’m afraid!” ch.22, p.148

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Victory... defeat... words like these mean nothing. Life lies deeper than the images they conjure and is already preparing new ones. One victory weakens a nation; one failure rouses another. The defeat Rivière has endured may be a promise of coming closer to true victory. All that matters is that events keep moving forward. ch.23, p.151

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The question troubling Rivière cannot be resolved by simply defending the great values that will endure in human history. It touches on the harder question of how to accept the ‘sacrifice of individuals’ demanded in their name. His long meditation seems to lead toward human permanence.

As the line ‘An end justifies nothing, but action (toward that end) saves us from death’ suggests, Saint-Exupéry offers human permanence through action as his answer. The happiness of ordinary people, the peace of an evening meal—all these things will someday disappear with time. Would it not be better, then, to overcome human mortality through something enduring, like the stone pillars of the Inca civilization...? This will to endure (I want to understand the Korean word uiji here in both its senses: 意志, ‘will,’ and 依支, ‘reliance’!) must be what drives Rivière to press on with the dangerous undertaking of night flight. Commentary on the Work