There is a moment in The Little Prince that has been making readers cry for eighty years, and it is not the ending.

The little prince has traveled across the universe, visiting one absurd planet after another, meeting a king with no subjects, a vain man who hears only applause, a businessman who "owns" the stars by counting them and locking the totals in a drawer. (He is very busy, the businessman. He has no time to look up.) The prince has left behind his tiny asteroid and the single rose he tended there—a flower who was fragile and particular, but whom he watered and sheltered and loved.

Then he lands on Earth and discovers a garden.

It is full of roses. Thousands of them. All identical to his.

He weeps. She had told him she was unique in all the universe. She had lied. He was not a great prince caring for a singular treasure. He was a fool who had been duped by an ordinary flower.

This is where the fox finds him, to share one of the most profound lessons of the entire novella. But first, it helps to know something about the man who wrote him into the story.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was not supposed to amount to much. Born in 1900 to a fading aristocratic family in Lyon, France, he lost his father before his fourth birthday and daydreamed his way through school. He failed his entrance exams to the Naval Academy. He sold trucks. He kept a bookkeeping job just long enough to prove he couldn't keep a bookkeeping job. If you had asked his teachers to predict his future, they might have guessed "cheerful vagrant."

But his life changed when he learned to fly.

In 1926, he joined Aéropostale, the pioneering French airmail service, and found his calling in an open cockpit above the Sahara. He flew routes across the most dangerous terrain on earth—the Pyrenees, the Andes, the endless North African sand—in biplanes that had no business staying airborne. Pilots died regularly. Saint-Exupéry crashed multiple times and walked away from wreckage that should have killed him. He had the survival instincts of a cat and, evidently, a similar number of lives.

In 1935, attempting a speed record from Paris to Saigon, he went down in the Sahara and wandered for four days without water, hallucinating, preparing to die. A Bedouin on a camel appeared and saved him at the last possible hour. This is the kind of disaster that would make Hemingway green with envy. If you have ever wondered why The Little Prince takes place in a desert, now you know. He had been there. He had almost stayed.

When Germany conquered France in 1940, Saint-Exupéry fled to New York. He was miserable there—forty years old, grounded, estranged from his tempestuous wife Consuelo, watching his country suffer from the helpless distance of a Long Island rental house. So he did what writers do with despair: he made something out of it. He wrote a children's book and illustrated it himself, in simple watercolors. It would become one of the best-selling books in history, with more than 140 million copies sold—which only proves that none of us have any idea what we're doing when we sit down to work.

Within a year of its publication, he had pulled every string he could find to get back into a cockpit. He was forty-three, in poor health, far past the age limit for combat pilots. On July 31, 1944, he took off from Corsica on a reconnaissance mission over occupied France and never returned. His silver identity bracelet was ultimately found in a fisherman's net off Marseille in 1998. His plane was discovered on the Mediterranean seabed in 2000. He was forty-four. The book had been in the world barely a year.

So when the fox speaks, it is worth listening. A man who had crashed in deserts, survived on borrowed time, and knew he was flying toward his own death put these words in the fox's mouth. I must believe they were not written lightly.

The fox asks the little prince to “tame” him.

The prince does not understand the word.

"It means to establish ties," the fox explains. Right now, the fox says, you are nothing to me—just one of a hundred thousand little boys. And I am nothing to you—just one of a hundred thousand foxes. We do not need each other. But if you tame me, everything changes. Your footsteps will sound different from all the others. Theirs send me underground. Yours will call me out, like music.

How do you tame someone? It takes time, the fox says. You must come at the same hour each day, so I can begin to feel happy as that hour approaches. You must be patient. You must sit a little closer each day. There are no shortcuts. This is, I should note, roughly the opposite of every dating app's business model (though, in fairness, it worked for me).

And then, after the taming is complete, the fox sends the prince back to the rose garden.

This time, the prince does not weep. He has learned something transformative.

He looks at the thousands of identical roses and says something that would be arrogant if it were not so tender: "You are beautiful, but you are empty. No one could die for you. My rose—she alone is more important than all of you together, because it is she that I have watered. Because it is she that I have put under the glass globe. Because it is she that I have sheltered. Because she is my rose."

Here is what the fox taught, and what I think Saint-Exupéry was trying to say before he flew off to die:

We have it backward.

We believe that valuable things deserve our love. That the task of life is to identify what is worthy—the right spouse, the right career, the right city, the right friends—and invest accordingly. We are all, in our way, parsing the rose garden, looking for the best bloom.

The fox says the opposite. The rose is not valuable and therefore loved. The rose is loved and therefore valuable. The hours the prince spent watering her, sheltering her, listening to her—those hours were not a response to her worth. They were the source of her worth. She became irreplaceable because he treated her as irreplaceable, long before she had earned it. And, even better, this worth only grows.

This is not sentimental. It is almost upsetting, if you think about it. It means we are not discovering value. We are creating it. And we are creating it all the time, whether we know it or not, through the simple act of attention.

The businessman counts the stars and owns nothing. The prince tends one rose and possesses everything. The difference is not what they chose. It is that one of them gave himself away.

Which means two things, I think.

First: you are already someone's rose. Not necessarily in the romantic sense. And not because you earned it. Not because you performed well enough to merit selection from the garden. You are irreplaceable to someone because they gave you their time before you deserved it—and that gift is what made you worthy of it. We are not loved because we are valuable. We become valuable because we are loved.

But second: you have this same power. The people you tend will become unique in all the world. Not because you chose wisely. Not because you found the objectively best ones. But because you chose them—and the choosing, the tending, the patient showing up at the same hour each day, is what will make them singular.

The fox's secret is not a recipe for self-improvement. It is an invitation to stop searching and start watering.

Your rose is already nearby. And she is yours—which, it turns out, is the whole of what matters.

John

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad