What the Fox Knew

There are books that mankind has decided not to read, and the most effective method it has found for not reading them is to give them to children. The Little Prince is one of them. It has been in print for more than eighty years, it has been translated into hundreds of languages, it is given at christenings and quoted at funerals, and its secret (the author had the courtesy to call it that, and to put it in the mouth of a fox) is written out in full on a page anyone can open. No one has stolen it, because there is nothing to steal. That circumstance, which a publisher would take for a guarantee of success, seems to me the proof of something else: a secret that survives intact through millions of copies is not a secret of doors. It is a secret of nature. I said as much in No Longer Divided about our rituals, which have been in print for centuries without losing anything essential, because the essential was never on the paper. The fox said it earlier, and in fewer words.

Borges once imagined a sect whose rite no one describes and which everyone, nevertheless, performs in some fashion, in ruins, in cellars, with an embarrassment that does not prevent obedience. I suspect the Sect of the Phoenix has a French relation, and that its scripture has watercolours.

The planets, or the modern world in six stations

Before the fox there is a journey, and the journey is a census. The little prince visits six planets, and on each he finds a man alone, shut inside a function he has mistaken for a being. The king who reigns over nothing and gives only the orders that would be obeyed anyway. The conceited man who needs to be admired and hears nothing else. The tippler who drinks to forget that he drinks. The businessman who counts stars because counting them seems to him to own them, and who does not know what they are: Guénon would have recognised him at once as the model citizen of the reign of quantity, the man who has put number in the place of quality and the inventory in the place of contemplation. The geographer who records mountains and rivers and has never left his study, because exploring is not his business: the pure speculative, who knows the map by hearsay and so does not know that the map is left at the door.

There is one exception, and the text marks it with a delicacy that almost goes unnoticed. The lamplighter, who lights and puts out his lamp every minute on a planet that turns too fast, obeys orders that no longer make sense and carries them out all the same. The little prince thinks he is the only one of them all who does not seem ridiculous, because he is thinking of something other than himself. It is the exact image of the officer who repeats a rite he no longer understands: absurd in the eyes of the world, and yet the only one who still delivers something. Guénon said it plainly: the rite remains a vehicle even when its officers no longer know what they are doing, and its effect is deferred, like a seed that lacks the conditions to open. The lamplighter is a deferred seed in uniform.

The fox

The meeting begins with a misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding is the first lesson. The little prince, unhappy, asks the fox to play with him. The fox refuses: he cannot play, he says, because he has not been tamed. There is no cruelty in that refusal. There is a condition. What the child asks for (company, consolation, a moment's relief) is exactly what is asked of a lodge today: something given without anything being needed first. And the fox answers what every serious path answers: before anything passes from one to the other there has to be a tie, and a tie is not improvised.

To tame, the fox explains, is an act too often neglected: it means to establish ties. Notice the adjective. He does not say it is difficult, or secret, or lofty: he says it is neglected. It is the diagnosis of the first part of No Longer Divided put into a sentence. What has been lost is not a content but a relation; and what is passed on through a relation is not of the order of information, and so it is not in books, it cannot be stolen, and it is not lost through indiscretion.

Then comes the method, and here the fox stops resembling a character in a story and begins to resemble a master. You must be very patient, he says. The little prince will sit at first a little way off, in the grass; the fox will look at him out of the corner of his eye, and he will say nothing, because words are the source of misunderstandings. And every day he will be able to sit a little closer. The fox does not teach. He provides the occasion and points out the means, which is all a master can do, and when he tries to do more, he gets in the way.