What is the purpose of life? The Aim

In Saint-Exupery’s most famous novella, the main character of the Little Prince leaves his tiny planet, an asteroid no bigger than a house, to see what he can discover about the rest of the universe. He visits six other asteroids – each of which is inhabited by just one adult who is foolish in his own way.

He visits the King, who apparently reigns over the stars but only by ordering them to do what they would normally do anyway.

He encounters the Conceited Man, who wants to be admired by everyone; he cannot hear anything that is not a compliment, but he lives alone on his planet.

The Little Prince meets the Drunkard, who drinks to forget,

and the Businessman who is constantly busy counting the stars he thinks he owns. He wishes to use them to buy more stars.

On one asteroid, he finds the Lamplighter, who lights and extinguishes the lamp once a minute, at the rotation speed of his asteroid, endlessly, uselessly, getting no rest.

And he encounters the Geographer, who spends all of his time with his nose in astronomic maps, but never leaves his desk to examine his own planet.

Ordinary men as we know them are like the solitary inhabitants of the asteroids visited by the Prince. Each one is locked in his own world, in the prison of his role, sealed in a bubble of vanity and egocentricity, constantly busy in a hypnotic concept of work, doing what they do not love, in places and with people they have not chosen.

But moreover we are most perfectly represented by the railway Switchman whom the Little Prince meets on the seventh planet: the Earth. He is the most emblematic character study on the absurdity and ridiculousness of the human condition. In his mirror we can see the parody of ourselves – our deformed image and the allegory of our lives. The Switchman tells the prince how passengers constantly rush from one place to another aboard trains – never satisfied with where they are, and not knowing what they are after, with only the children amongst them bothering to look out of the windows.

 *Where are we heading?
 *What is our journey’s destiny?
 *What is our aim in life?

We never stop in silence and solitude to take time to muse on these crucial questions.