Le Petit Prince

I must be living under a rock because I have only just discovered this amazing book. It was written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery and has sold millions of copies. It is originally French but it has been translated into many other languages since it was published in 1943.

Thanks to the wonder of the Internet and its lack of governance... this book is effectively free for consumption. Hurray.

Well, this book is like a "Guide to Life, Relationships and Almost Everything Else" under the disguise of a children's book. There are so many meaningful messages the author sends across in each chapter that it's really amazing how he put all that into a book with less than a hundred pages.

Here is one very interesting quote from the book:

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

Essentially, the amount of time we spent on our relationships or perhaps, anything in particular, are what makes them so important to us. How true. Why do we seek our long lost friends or childhood sweethearts? These friends are of no immediate relevance to our current stage in life, but because they have shared so much of our past with us, they are still very special in our eyes.

But then again, if what makes them special is the amount of time we have spent with them then it doesn't really matter who they are, does it? The reason why anyone is more than a stranger seems to be just because we happened to meet them at some point in our lives and decided to spend more time with them.

How did we decide? Perhaps they had the same interests. Perhaps they were the only ones around. It seems to sound a little depressing but it makes sense because we don't know people until we meet them, talk to them and find out their thoughts etc. Their characters apparently have no bearing on why we started to know them in the first place. Who they are underneath though, will perhaps determine how special they can get.

There are 6 billion people in this world and chances are, you won't get to meet everyone. So personally I am starting to believe that in life, God/Fate/Luck/Probability brings you this particular bunch of people who are your potential friends/spouse/whatever. Then it is up to us to choose which one to go along with. (Come to think of it, I find this an eerie similarity to those Jap dating simulation games)

What does this all mean?

I knew you all because God/Fate/Luck/Probability gave me the candidates. Then I anyhow voted. Mwahahahaha...