We all know that every young person has the potential to achieve great things in life, but we also know that so many will be denied that potential by force of their circumstances.
This is part of the epilogue of ‘Wind, Sand and Stars’ by Antoine de Ste. Exupery (who also wrote ‘The Little Prince’), originally written in the 1930s and slightly amended for today’s audiences, and read for Share Radio by Boris Pomerantz.
So it was written about 80 years ago: but we think you will agree that it speaks as strongly today as it did then.
A few years ago, in the course of a long railway journey, I was suddenly seized by a desire to make a tour of the little country in which I was locked up for three days, cradled in that rattle that is like the sound of pebbles rolled over and over by the waves; and I got up out of my berth.
At one in the morning I went through the train in all its length. The sleeping cars were empty. The first-class carriages were empty. They put me in mind of the luxurious hotels on the Riviera that open in winter for a single guest, the last representative of an extinct fauna.
A sign of bitter times.
But the third-class carriages were crowded with hundreds of Polish workmen sent home from France. I made my way along those passages, stepping over sprawling bodies and peering into the carriages. In the dim glow cast by the night-lamps into these barren and comfortless compartments I saw a confused mass of people churned about by the swaying of the train, the whole thing looking and smelling like a barrack-room. A whole nation returning to its native poverty seemed to sprawl there in a sea of bad dreams. Great shaven heads rolled on the cushion-less benches.
Men, women, and children were stirring in their sleep, tossing from left to right and back again as if attacked by all the noises and jerkings that threatened them in their oblivion. They had not found the hospitality of a sweet slumber.
Looking at them I said to myself that they had lost half their human quality. These people had been knocked about from one end of Europe to the other by the economic currents; they had been torn from their little houses in the north of France, from their tiny garden-plots, their three pots of geranium that always stood in the windows of the Polish miners' families. I saw lying beside them pots and pans, blankets, curtains, bound into bundles badly tied and swollen with hernias. Out of all that they had caressed or loved in France, out of everything they had succeeded in taming in their four or five years in my country -the cat, the dog, the geranium - they had been able to bring away with them only a few kitchen utensils, two or three blankets, a curtain or so.
A baby lay at the breast of a mother so weary that she seemed asleep. Life was being transmitted in the shabbiness and the disorder of this journey. I looked at the father. A powerful skull as naked as a stone. A body hunched over in uncomfortable sleep, imprisoned in working clothes, all humps and hollows. The man looked like a lump of clay, like one of those sluggish and shapeless derelicts that crumple into sleep in our public markets.
And I thought: The problem does not reside in this poverty, in this filth, in this ugliness.
But this same man and this same woman met one day. This man must have smiled at this woman. He may, after his work was done, have brought her flowers. Timid and awkward, perhaps he trembled lest she disdain him. And this woman, out of natural coquetry, this woman sure of her charms, perhaps took pleasure in teasing him. And this man, this man who is now no more than a machine for swinging a pick or a sledge-hammer, must have felt in his heart a delicious anguish.
The mystery is that they should have become these lumps of clay. Into what terrible mould were they forced? What was it that marked them like this as if they had been put through a monstrous stamping machine? A deer, a gazelle, any animal grown old, preserves its grace. What is it that corrupts this wonderful clay of which humans are kneaded?
I went on through these people whose slumber was as sinister as a den of evil. A vague noise floated in the air made up of raucous snores, obscure moanings, and the scraping of clogs as their wearers, broken on one side, sought comfort on the other. And always the muted accompaniment of those pebbles rolled over and over by the waves.
I sat down face to face with one couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face.
What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants. Forth from these lumps of clay had sprung this miracle of delight and grace. I bent over the smooth brow, and I said to myself: This is a musician's face. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become?
When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all the gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine. This little Mozart will love shoddy music in the stench of night dives. This little Mozart is condemned.
I went back to my sleeping car. I said to myself: Their fate may not cause these people suffering. It is not an impulse to charity that has upset me like this. I am not weeping over an eternally open wound. Those who carry the wound may not feel it. It is the human race and not the individual that is wounded here, is outraged here.
What torments me tonight is the gardener's point of view. What torments me is not this poverty to which, after all, a man may be able to accustom himself as easily as to sloth. What torments me is not the humps nor hollows nor the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these people, of Mozart murdered.
Only the Spirit, if it breathe upon the clay, can create humanity.
This is part of the epilogue of ‘Wind, Sand and Stars’ by Antoine de Ste Exupery, written in 1930s’ France.
Of course the same problems of migration and refugees, deprivation and lack of opportunity for young people remain with us today, and if you’d like to find out more about how you can help, please visit sharefound.org.