To live is to be slowly born
A curious thing. The pilot and writer, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, said:
No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.
To live is to be slowly born.
It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls!
And yet it’s more common to find the quote mangled, so that the first two sentences read:
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
“A single event…” is found in 780 results in Google.
“No single event…” is found in 135.
(The third sentence is invariably omitted).
The original suggests that change in ourselves comes about slowly. We are “slowly born” because no one event can awaken a completely new us, although that, by implication, can happen given enough time.
The mangled version puts more emphasis on the individual changes of which Saint Exupéry was so skeptical. And yet it too suggests that we are “slowly born.”
When I first compared the two versions side by side I thought that the difference was simply a discussion of gradualism, with the original seeming to suggest that the individual events of our lives are not in themselves significant, and yet they mount up to the point where a stranger previously unknown to us is awakened within us, while the mangled version is saying that, yes, those small changes are significant precisely because they awaken, even if just by a small degree, that stranger, that new us.
But then I realized that my reading of the mangled version was mangling my reading of the original! The correct version is not talking about a succession of small changes amounting to a large change overall, but that large, sudden awakenings do happen, but that there is no one thing that happens to us that causes this. There may be one apparent trigger for the sudden awakening of a new us, but that awakening is the end result of a long and gradual path of preparation.
The mangled version says that awakening is gradual; the original version says that awakening is sudden, but arises because of gradual changes.
Added later:
Another curiosity is that when looking for the French original I discovered that while English-language sites invariably quote only the first two sentences:
A/No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born
The vast majority of French sites quote only the last two:
Vivre, c’est naître lentement. Il serait un peu trop aisé d’emprunter des âmes toutes faites ! (To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls!
And the quote comes from de Saint Exupéry’s book Flight to Arras (Pilote de Guerre).
The mangled quote appears to have been published in several books, which gives an idea of how well modern publishers check their facts. To their credit my own publisher, Windhorse, insist on tracking down a source for every quotation. This had me at times stuck in my local library until late at night, trying to find exactly where in a book a quotation was, and that was sometimes after I had spent many hours trying to find which book the quotation was in, and whether it had even been correctly attributed in the first place. The world of online quotations is basically a giant system of plagiarism, with each quotations site copying material wholesale from the others. Under this system misinformation propagates with unstoppable momentum. So much for the wisdom of crowds!
Added even later: After a bit more searching I found all three sentences in French:
Aucune circonstance ne réveille en nous un étranger dont nous n’aurions rien soupçonné. Vivre, c’est naître lentement. Il serait un peu trop aisé d’emprunter des âmes toutes faites !
plus the passage immediately following them in the book:
Une illumination soudaine semble parfois faire bifurquer une destinée. Mais l’illumination n’est que la vision soudaine, par l’Esprit, d’une route longuement préparée. J’ai appris lentement la grammaire. On m’a exercé à la syntaxe. On a éveillé mes sentiments. Et voilà brusquement qu’un poème me frappe au cœur.
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You’re currently reading “To live is to be slowly born,” an entry on Bodhipaksa's blog, bodhi tree swaying
Published: Feb 07 2008
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Stumbled upon this while looking for quotes by Antoine de Saint Exupery. Very interesting!