How Can We Forget Our First Love?
I have never truly loved any books like the ones I loved when I was 13 years old. Let’s all admit it. We never really got over our first loves. We love these books, dearly and uncritically, the way we love the smell of our first girlfriend’s perfume, no matter how cheap and tacky it might have been. To someone whose memory has been cluttered with thousands of sitcom episodes (Gina Linetti!) and hundreds of hours of RomCom films, there is still a relentless sort of nostalgia that triggers a yearning joy when I chance upon The Little Prince. The book was awesome.
It still is.
As I look at the book now, the dissonance between perception and memory creates a weird double-exposure effect. Due to my life experience, I can see the book for what it is. It is a children book. Or at least it is styled in such a manner. But I also see it, more vividly, as the book is to me — a story about life and human nature. Even though it may appear at first glance that the talking fox is a mere friendly encounter, it goes further than that.
The fox is not being friendly. The fox is being more than a friend. The fox says that “One sees clearly only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eye.” In regards to The Little Prince’s rose, the fox also mention that “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” This isn’t just a book about adventures and meeting new people along the way. This is a book that teaches us how to deal with human relationships. What makes this book brilliant isn’t the fact that it teaches us how to deal with human relationship, but it is genius in the sense that the lesson is taught in such an exceptionally simple way.
The story is so simple that it sticks with me till now. It is so simple that I am still gushing over it.
It takes a perceptual effort, a kind of mental squinting, to see the book as just any other ordinary children book. Sure enough, The Little Prince did not offer me new insights or ideas on how to be a good investor or do better at work/school. But the novel taught me how to be a good person, with me only realising it in hindsight. It is similar to how there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating about any deliberate attempt to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself, but it is only an aftereffect. It is the consequence of having lived in the way that we fully engage in the present that we feel happy afterwards.
It is the consequence of reading our first few novels at the age when we haven’t heard of any cliques and even dumb ideas are new that make these stories our favourites.
When we were (a lot) younger, we devour all kinds of information. The exotic details of stories and settings are like the sugary frosting on our cereals. These lessons about life and the world are the nutriments we need. I don’t want to believe that our personalities toughen up so much in adulthood that we’re no longer capable of being changed by art.
But the truth is part of the reason art loses it power over us is that we get old, and time doesn’t stop for anyone.
Like freshly poured sidewalk cement when young, it gradually set and harden over the years with whatever graffiti passers-by inscribing a little of their presence on it. Slowly, but not quite really, time slips by almost painlessly. Our 20’s turn into our 30’s the same way we look at our watch one minute and it is only 8:45 — the night is young, all the time in the world — and then suddenly it is last call. Despite all these, ever so often, we discover our own versions of The Little Prince. We discover that there is still a kid in all of us, and kids don’t lose their imaginary friends. Kids don’t simply get over their favourite soft toy. Kids don’t forget their first love.
