Redtree Times

In my civilization, he who is different from me does not impoverish me— he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves—in Man. When we of Group 2-33 argue of an evening, our arguments do not strain our fraternity, they reinforce it. For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras (1942)

I am just finishing the book Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that documents a single 1940 reconnaissance sortie that he piloted along with his 2-man crew, Group-2-33, during WW II. It took place as the vastly overmatched French military was in the final stages of its short-lived resistance to the Nazi invasion. The sortie, which took the crew over the invading German army’s positions, was an exercise in futility with the French flyers being outnumbered 10 to 1. The odds of returning from such a flight were about 1 in 5 and to be chosen for such a mission was almost always a death warrant for the chosen crew. Of the 23 crews in his unit, 17 had been lost in the first few weeks of the invasion.

Their futile sacrifice was as he described it as being “like glasses of water thrown onto a forest fire“

This book was written in 1942, two years after the fall of France, when the author was in America and two years before he was lost over the Mediterranean Sea during a 1944 mission after having rejoined his old unit.

It is a beautifully written and philosophical book that touches on a variety of subjects– mortality, sacrifice, the individual’s responsibility to Man, the strength that comes with diversity, and so on.

One of the metaphors he employed was to compare a pile of stones and a cathedral. A mere pile of stones is comprised on individual stones and has no real meaning. But when they are assembled with intent and care, a unity takes place that gives meaning and purpose to each stone. Each stone is still as it was– an individual stone with its own characteristics– but put together with other stones contributes to the creation of something greater than itself, something with meaning and purpose.  Something stronger than a pile of stones in which each stone only serves itself.

There’s a lot more to his metaphor than I am sharing this morning. But one thing that jumped out at me was how he described how a country fails, how the cathedral that was once assembled begins to come apart, becoming a heap of stones once more, without any uniting bond to hold them together. It is this point when the power of the collective often falls into the hand of one individual– the reign of one stone over a heap of stones. He describes this new governance as being selfish and intolerant, less diverse and without compassion or charity.

That description along with the following passage really struck a nerve with me, sounding as though he were explicitly writing about the current administration here and their transactional coldness and cruelty.  

The good of the community is a thing which they perceive in arithmetic—and it is arithmetic that governs them. They learn by their arithmetic that they would incur loss if they sought to transcend themselves and become greater than they are. Consequently, they must hate those who differ from them—since they possess nothing higher than themselves with which to fuse. Every foreign way of life, every foreign race, every foreign system of thought is necessarily an affront to them. They have no power to absorb others, for if we are to convert men to our way we cannot do it by amputating them but must do it by teaching them to express themselves, offering a goal to their aspirations and a territory for the deployment of their energies. To convert is always to set free. A cathedral is able to absorb its stones, which have no meaning but in it. But the rock pile absorbs nothing; and for want of power to absorb, it can only crush. It is not astonishing that a rock pile, with its great weight, possess more power than stones strewn in a field.

And yet it is I who am the stronger.

I am the stronger provided that I am able to find myself. Provided our Humanism restores Man amongst us. Provided we are able to found our community, and, founding it, make use of the sole efficacious instrument —charity. For our community, as it was when our civilization built it, was no mere sum of interests: it was a sum of gifts. I am the stronger because the tree is stronger than the materials of which it is composed. It drained those materials into itself. It transformed them into itself. The cathedral is more radiant than any heap of stones. I am the stronger because only my civilization possesses the power to bind into its unity all diversity without depriving any element of its individuality.

It feels in recent years as though our cathedral has broken down and we have fallen apart into piles of stones that lack all unity. We are in the Reign of One Stone and its ability to crush with the weight of its rockpile. Until we recognize the power we possess when we utilize and unify every diverse stone, the grand cathedral we once knew remains little more than a cold and crude stone heap.

And that is a terrible loss for all…