On Wind, Sand and Stars

This is a good collection of vignettes by acclaimed author and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Most of the chapters deal with his experiences flying for Aéropostale, and the best is by far the famous case of his crash in the Libyan Sahara, which heavily inspired The Little Prince.

The worst is his chapter on the Spanish Civil War—Saint-Exupéry makes the point that communists and fascists were killing one another over ideology and that the war was an exercise in futility. Surely, there is something surreal about civil war over ideology, but this section gave me the sense that Saint-Exupéry did not have much in the way of political values, and it comes off as wishy-washy “why can’t we hang out with fascists without problems?”

Nevertheless, Saint-Exupéry did a great deal to develop an image of the early age of flight, which today we can frequently see in rose-tinted nostalgia. You can feel the mythmaking emerge through Saint-Exupéry’s writing, and I honestly love that.

Altogether, this is a great read to get a sense of Saint-Exupéry’s “texture.”