night flight [saint exupéry]

Curiously I finished the last ten pages of Saint Exupéry’s tale whilst in the sky above South America, which is where much of the novel takes place. (The rest takes place on the ground in Buenos Aires). I’d begun it a month or so ago, and although it’s short, the pressure of land-living lead to a fallow period of reading, and I only managed to recover the book once I myself had taken flight. It’s a short novel with an existential twinge. Curiously, again, I watched a documentary on the flight about a free climber, Alex Honnold, the man who climbed the sheer cliff face of El Capitan without ropes. (Free Solo, d. Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi).  Both Free Solo and Night Flight are meditations on society’s relationship with death. In Free Solo the climber, a naif, categorises himself as someone who has a warrior spirit, who finds value in life through the act of occupying the edge on which life and death is balanced. Saint Exupéry’s pilots explore similar celestial territory. Situated between the earth and the stars, they roam a neverland where the day-to-day realities are left behind; a celestial sphere which soars, Nietzschian, above humanity’s mundane glories. Night Flight, however, makes it very clear that this intergalactic consciousness is actually at the service of the mundane. The pilots are part of a system which has been carefully organised in order to deliver the mail from South America to Europe. Their existentialism is assimilated by society. Similarly, the free climber becomes part of a system, his individualism curbed by the presence of a camera crew and his growing awareness that the freedom he encounters in his perilous escapades is no longer something he can keep to himself. The world will claim its share. Both Saint Exupéry’s pilots and the free climber have been blessed to see and inhabit another world which mere mortals never get to experience. The longing to go beyond, to explore that space which is sacred, private, is still out there. But modernity curtails this instinct. We live this longing vicariously, through books or films. These adventurers are our high priests, our shamans, eccentrics communicating from the other side, revealing another way of living which the ‘civilised’ world has banished.