Airborne Philosophy

“A pilot’s business is with the wind, with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea… He looks forward to port as to a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars.”

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

‘Philosopher’ really isn’t much of a career option these days, if it ever was a profession taken seriously by your average working man. Anyways, it hardly stands that a person sitting at home, doing not much more than sketching and organizing his or her thoughts can be expected to demonstrate some higher truth. The most vibrant ideas regarding that elusive concept known as “the meaning of life” are usually arrived at by men and women that have immersed themselves in the world, experience being a superior barometer of wisdom than intelligence. Thus, more than the Wall Street buccaneer it is often the gutter poet who understands life’s tragic inevitability far better, who, for all his material poverty, can articulate the arc of existence more beautifully.

It is no surprise then that those who come of age and choose a career that sends them forth into the world should return from their journeys with something valuable gleaned. Soldiers, sailors, circus performers not only travel but also witness human nature at its extremes, pieces of folly, glory and degradation providing potent color for a person’s scheme. A pilot is slightly more privileged in being literally above it all, on the very edge between earth and space. Is it the proximity to the heavens that gives the pilot his philosophical weight? The view of the Earth as God might look down upon it? Or possibly is it the risking of one’s life to elements of earth that are ferocious, capricious and untamable?

Flying is one of those modern conveniences so taken for granted that it is no longer special to fly and passengers need massive distractions with in-flight entertainment to pass the time. The idea of flight, once romanticized and later marveled as one of man’s greatest ingenuities, has the contemporary patina of plastic.

But it was not always so easy getting from one place to the next. In the early days of long-haul travel it was actually quite dangerous and emergency crash landings were hardly out of the question. We often think of air traffic as the movement of people but it is just as often the movement of people’s things— mementoes, documents, food, invoices, photographs, antiquities, contraband, love letters. FedEx and DHL are today’s major message carriers, but before the torch was privatized, airmail had been the domain of the state, a government job maybe, but one in which you could fly to the ends of the earth.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery is probably the most important pilot you might not have ever heard of. Even if you don’t know his name, you know his most famous work, The Little Prince, which is one of the best-selling and most-translated books in the history of the world. What Saint-Exupery manages in his children’s book is an adaptation of his general philosophy, summed up in his own words, “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”

Saint-Exupery was as compulsive a graphophiliac as he was an aviator, publishing often throughout his brief life. Not as famous as his children’s book, Wind, Sand and Stars, is no less important in engaging the reader in his personal philosophical musings, that comprehensively, reads as some of the most beautiful humanistic espousals ever rendered.

The title references the pilot’s most elemental possessions composing his dangers, his bearings, and perhaps his inspirations. Saint-Exupery flew mail on the Toulouse-Dakar route, an occasionally fraught journey that took him over the Spanish Pyrenees and a great expanse of the Sahara Desert. This was in the 1920s and 1930s, at the twilight of the French colonial empire. In this golden age of aviation, pilots had far fewer instruments with which to monitor their journeys and thus survived only with sharp instincts and an aptitude for detail. They stored in their heads a bird’s eye’s lay of the land the way a stationmaster might rattle off timetables:

“Little by little, under the lamp, the Spain of my map became a sort of fairyland. The crosses I marked to indicate safety zones and traps were so many buoys and beacons. I charted the farmer, the thirty sheep, the brook. And, exactly where she stood, I set a buoy to mark the shepherdess forgotten by the geographers.”

It was a job Saint-Exupery loved, not for the responsibility of the mail he carried, but because it afforded him great frontiers for his insatiable curiosity. From his anecdotes, one senses a sensational dinner companion who greatly appreciates everything that had ever happened to him, no matter how small. His prose rings of vitality and gratitude in equal measures.

In Wind, Sand, and Stars, Saint-Exupery writes about his cherry flight, the brotherhood of pilots, the loneliness of the French colonial desert posts, the views over the Andes, the purchase and freeing of an African slave, emergency landings, and plenty of hair-raising episodes fighting wind to stave off a crash so as to fly one more day. But like any great writer, he is building towards something momentous and it is in the final two chapters in the book where Saint-Exupery becomes expansive not about airplanes and flying but about men and living.

In December, 1935, attempting a record-breaking flight from Paris to Saigon, Saint-Exupery crash-landed in the Libyan Desert. Saint-Exupery and his engineer survived but they didn’t know their coordinates and had only an orange, some grapes, and wine to survive. They had no wireless to communicate their situation and no idea which direction portended water, man, civilization. The rule of thumb recommended pilots stay close to their aircraft, as it was more likely for rescue teams to spot the crash site than wandering dots. But the Sahara was huge ground to cover and what if just over the next sand dune was a village with a well?

A friend of Saint-Exupery, Guillaumet, had crashed in the Andes a few years earlier and had survived. Survival is about will power as much as it is about wits. In moving across a limitlessly barren land, it is his friend’s words that he remembers and from which he gathers both motivation and hope: “What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step but you have to take it.”

Over the next few days they wander from the plane searching, returning before nightfall, laying out an oil-slick tarp to collect whatever moisture accumulated over the night, retching afterwards. Hallucinations plague them. It would have been so easy for the both of them to lay down on the sand and sleep for all time, were it not for their family, who would have to go on without them:

“I was haunted by a vision of my wife’s eyes under the halo of her hat. Of her face I could see only the eyes questioning me, looking at me yearningly. I am answering, answering with all my strength! What flame cold leap higher than this that darts up into the night from my heart?”

Completely out of food and liquid they commit to a direction they hope is the sea and salvation. They become weary of an enveloping bright light that they believe will herald the end. Near death, they encounter a nomad who in giving them water and food and taking them in, saves their lives. Saint-Exupery writes of his gratitude thus:

“You, Bedouin of Libya who saved our lives, though you will dwell for ever in my memory yet I shall never be able to recapture your features. You are Humanity and your face comes into my mind simply as man incarnate. You, our beloved fellowman, did not know who we might be and yet you recognized us without fail. And I, in my turn, shall recognize you in the faces of all mankind.”

The Little Prince was inspired by Saint-Exupery's desert crash

*

“Nothing is easier than to divide men into rightists and leftists, hunchbacks and straightbacks, fascists and democrats.” -- Saint Exupery

Having narrowly survived such an ordeal and possessing such rich affection for humanity, what might have motivated Saint-Exupery to go to Spain in 1936, where the brutal ideological bloodbath was a preview stage for the Great War to come? Was he like Voltaire’s Candide, an individual fatally curious, but operating with a different incentive in mind: rather than hypothesizing that this may be the best of all possible worlds, was Saint-Exupery curious to know what abstract political idea should be worth one’s life?

After all was any fascist, monarchist, anarchist, communist more right than another? Saint-Exupery is not above politics— he is wise to know it affects all areas of men’s lives— he just argues that the willingness to kill and be killed for a belief system betrays a fundamental, yet invisible rule of man: “All beliefs are demonstrably true. All men are demonstrably in the right. Anything can be demonstrated by logic… To agree to discuss them is tantamount to despairing of the salvation of mankind— whereas everywhere about us men manifest identical yearnings. What all of us want is to be set free.”

Though a pioneer in aviation, interestingly Saint-Exupery disdained many of the emerging rubrics of modern life: bureaucracy, ideology, and most especially, industrialization. What he seemed to loathe in all of these was depersonalization, the reduction of man into a machine processed to dig minerals from the earth, file paperwork, or charge enemy trenches. In doing so it was quickly or slowly making null and void a human being.

Later, back in France, Saint-Exupery is restless on an overnight train and wanders to the lower class compartments where Polish migrant workers are sardine-canned into tight compartments, exhausted and beaten-down. He takes a seat across a young couple as extinguished as any of them and concludes:

“The problem does not reside in this poverty, in this filth, in this ugliness. But this same man and this same woman met one day. This man must have smiled at this woman. He may, after his work was done, have brought her flowers. Timid and awkward, perhaps he trembled lest she disdain him. And this woman, out of natural coquetry, this woman sure of her charms, perhaps took pleasure in teasing him. And this man, this man who is now no more than a machine for swinging a pick or a sledge-hammer, must have felt in his heart a delicious anguish. The mystery is that they should become these lumps of clay. Into what terrible mould were they forced? What was it that marked them like this as if they had been put through a monstrous stamping machine? A deer, a gazelle, any animal grown old preserves its grace. What is it that corrupts this wonderful clay of which man is kneaded?”

It is the forces of tragedy at work that death often robs those most vivacious among us. In 1944, flying for the French Free Forces, Saint-Exupery was shot down after taking off from Corsica. He was just forty-four years old. What he would have had to say about Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Cold War terror, the end of colonialism, and Civil Rights movements we shall never know.

In his brief life, Saint-Exupery had many heartbreaking experiences but when he witnessed death, he did not see it as a moment of great pain or abasement, but a man's spirit being stolen from the world:

“I thought of the white sanatorium where the light of a man’s life goes quietly out in the presence of those who love him and who garner as if it were an inestimable treasure his last words, his ultimate smile. How right hey are! Seeing that this same whole is never again to take shape in the world. Never again will be heard exactly that note of laughter, that intonation of voice, that quality of repartee. Each individual is a miracle. No wonder we go on speaking of the dead for twenty years.”

Or in the cases of some truly loving, charismatic men, go on cherishing for all eternity.

The Spirit of '76

The most humanistic pronouncement in the history of political tracts, that which asserts "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are among man's "certain inalienable rights," is the utopian secular American signature written into our Declaration of Independence. That was the spirit of '76 and a quality of political imagination that has been difficult to live up to ever since. Certainly, Thomas Jefferson's ebullient claims taken at face value are abstract but in the proper contexts they can be defined with certain qualifications. For example, the right to "life" would be the right to proper, affordable health care. "Liberty" would entail a transparent government, the closure of illegal detention centers, proper civilian trials and habeas corpus. The pursuit of happiness is the fuzziest of the three, yet so-called modern day patriots would probably equate it with mass consumption. But if the revolutionaries of 1776 knew their strenuous efforts were undergone so that their descendants could laze around sofas tweeting, facebooking, shopping, and eating "freedom fries," would they have risked their fortunes fighting the formidable British empire? Or might they have stayed home to tend their farms, lamenting that the American Dream in a philosophical sense would always be just that, a dream?

David McCullough's history of George Washington's Continental army in the very grim fighting year of 1776 isn't asking those questions. As an establishment historian, a winner of two Pulitzers, McCullough is strictly concerned with the facts, drawing so generously from a prodigious survey of primary sources it's easy to forget that he's even there. 1776 is a focused work meaning that 1775's Battle of Bunker Hill is mentioned in passing and the battles of Lexington and Concord not at all. Nor are Valley Forge, the Maquis de Lafayette, and Yorktown discussed. As any sixth grader who passed his civics test will tell you, 1776 is the year the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, but even that monumental convergence of great philosophical minds merits just one paragraph. This book is about one man, George Washington, and his ragtag army.

As a fighting force it was a pretty pathetic sight, the Continental Army. Consider, in his own words, Washington's dire assessment of his underpaid, underfed, undertrained motley ranks:

"Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life-- unaccustomed to the din of arms- totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill, which being followed by a want of confidence in themselves when opposed to troops regularly trained, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge and superior in arms, makes them timid and ready to fly from their own shadows."

Your Average Soldier in Washington's Continental Army

1776 is divided into three parts: the siege of Boston, the battles of New York, and Washington's retreat through New Jersey, into eastern Pennsylvania. McCullough portrays the strategies of the British as well as the American forces in order to create a thorough narrative of the events in the early stage of the war (though to British high command, the word, 'war,' was never used as that would legitimize the conflict as one between sovereign states; 'rebellion' being the preferred epithet.) The British did not want to fight and would have been happy with a capitulation returning things more or less to the prior status quo. In fact, throughout the contest, the British eagerly proffered the olive branch, going so far as to publish a Proclamation granting amnesty to all revolutionaries conditional on their signing of a loyalty oath. That was refused by the rebels, even when it appeared the destruction of the Continental Army and therefore the American military seemed all but certain.

As many Americans would be today, many civilians at the time were perturbed by the revolution, more concerned with commerce than politics. Those so-called "Loyalists" were not necessarily monarchists, but just ordinary people at odds with a sweeping movement, more concerned with property and the safety of their family. Hoping to expedite the end of the war, many of them gave intelligence to the British, jeopardizing secret missions and troop deployments. Had Vegas odds been around in '76 only fools would have wagered on the rebels. Although in Massachusetts the Americans defeated the British in the challenge to command Dorchester Heights (instigating a humiliating Redcoat retreat), the situation went sour in New York, a city that was viewed by both sides as the key to the Hudson River and thus should it be taken by the British they would be able to split the rebels geographically, isolating New England, disrupting communication and supply lines. The Americans spent the spring of that year fortifying south Manhattan and Brooklyn against a formidable British siege: at one point one hundred frigates docked around Staten Island forming the largest Armada ever seen on the continent. But after the Americans lost The Battle of Brooklyn (it's interesting to place the fighting in a modern city context), Washington and his soldiers had to abandon Manhattan, the fortifications, and of course control of the Hudson River. It didn't do well for troop morale. Soldiers deserted in droves often taking their muskets home with them as souvenirs. Many of them, shoeless and hungry, deserted to the enemy.

Leading them in their flight was George Washington, a by-his-bootstraps surveyor-turned-wealthy planter with virtually no military experience prior to the war. What comes across from McCullough's exhaustive research is a plainspoken man of common sense, who was a small town fellow in over his head and knew it:

"Could I have foreseen the difficulties which have come upon us, could I have known that such a backwardness would have been discovered in the old soldiers to the service, all the generals upon earth should not have convinced me of the propriety of delaying an attack upon Boston till this time."

If Washington could have "justified the measure to posterity, and my own conscience," he would have, "retired to the back country, and lived in a wigwam." But that's why he's celebrated today as one of the Great American Heroes, because he believed in the Cause so fervently, that he was willing to risk his livelihood, and being a self-made man also had much to lose. Today he is revered as a national godhead but in the early stages of war, he lacked decisiveness and good judgment. Had the British known just how dire his situation was and had pursued the Americans beyond New Jersey and into Pennsylvania, it is likely the revolution would have failed and Washington would have disappeared into history books as a footnote. Perhaps, our journey to autonomy would have progressed like Canada's, evolving into dominion status, a bloodless passage towards sovereignty.

Crossing the Delaware

But Washington put on a good fight, which of course being primarily a military history, composes the climax of 1776. Famously on Christmas night, General Washington and his forces crossed the icy floes of the Delaware River in order to ambush the mercenary Hessian soldiers quartered in Trenton, New Jersey. The Hessians, perhaps drunk with holiday spirits, were properly surprised and routed. As far as battles go, it was hardly decisive in what would become an eight-year struggle. But McCullough treats it as a turning point in the war, a desperately needed morale injection as well as confirmation of Washington's leadership skills.

What makes 1776 a good read is the harrowing portrayal of how just how close Americans were to being vanquished. Then, just as now, to speak out and especially act against an unpopular government required tremendous courage. Had the rebels been forced to surrender under British terms they might have been executed or at the least had their livelihood ruined. They risked their lives because they seemed to really believe in what was at the time a newfangled concept of civil liberty, those certain unalienable rights. Without faith in these ambitions-- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-- the revolution would have likely failed.

Brave Men Putting Their Names to Independence

Today should we be asking the same questions as our Founding Fathers regarding the legitimacy of government? Does Congress and the President really intend to guarantee the rights of all citizens and if it does not, what is to be done? If you want to go back to that same prized parchment penned by Mr. Jefferson, he suggests something overlooked and ignored by the establishment hypocrites and power brokers today, that is:

"That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of the these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

It's something we should all think about come every 4th of July after the hot dogs and beer and pleasure seeking. Freedom is more than picking through the supermarket, the television, or the information superhighway, and its intrinsic value is revealed to us when we witness demonstrations in other countries, as seen most recently in Burma and Iran. What happened in 1776 was a movement, a collection of passionate philosophers who contemplated a better reality. This process, without proper liberal reform and better guarantees for the burgeoning poor and jobless, is likely to repeat itself once a crisis brings us to a breaking point.

The revolutionaries shocked the world. It happens from time to time. Let's just hope that when it happens again, it doesn't take eight years of war to recognize that a new humanitarian approach is the better way.