John Harris attempts to address this stunning author's unique quality with full regard for his evasion of categories. He contends that Saint-Exupery is in fact naively, perhaps sublimely simple and that his apparent complexity results from our underestimating his determination to fuse the aesthetic and the moral, to live a story whose motions struggle tirelessly toward an end. Saint-Exupery's oeuvre is thus of great and abiding relevance to us in at least two ways. First, it persistently implies that the human being must ...
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John Harris attempts to address this stunning author's unique quality with full regard for his evasion of categories. He contends that Saint-Exupery is in fact naively, perhaps sublimely simple and that his apparent complexity results from our underestimating his determination to fuse the aesthetic and the moral, to live a story whose motions struggle tirelessly toward an end. Saint-Exupery's oeuvre is thus of great and abiding relevance to us in at least two ways. First, it persistently implies that the human being must love beauty if he or she loves goodness. Perhaps no other author in literary history has agonized so coherently and honestly over the sense of an ending, rejecting facile solutions yet refusing to rest content with open-endedness. Out of chaos must come cosmos, even though a cosmos which is not exclusively, stately aesthetic must forever allow new intrusions of chaos. Antoine de Saint-Exupery may best be remembered for his magical -- The Little Prince. Saint-Exupery disappeared during the final days of World War II, presumably in a fatal crash of his P-38 fighter.
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