Michael Tyler is the Equal Justice Society Poet-in-Residence.
Many of us recall moments indelibly etched in our minds that upon reflection, transport us back to a location and circumstance with a cinematic clarity undiminished by fading memory or cluttered lives. I had such a moment: March 29,1968. It was a Friday, the consequential day I met The Little Prince.
I found him, lying on the fissured concrete of the playground at my school. I was profoundly struck by the contradiction of his appearance; small and simple in visage yet prominently standing atop a planet. I could not take my eyes off of him, as I felt magnetically drawn to retrieve him. Struggling to pronounce the author’s name on the book’s cover, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, I began walking to the Principal’s Office. I was a second grader who attended a Catholic school, and it was my moral obligation to take the book to the Lost & Found. Just before entering, I couldn’t do it. With the sweat of guilt beading on my forehead, I stashed the book in my bag, ran out the door and rushed to meet up with my brothers for our walk home.
I remember praying for forgiveness, feeling that I had stolen something and that whomever the book belonged to was going to be punished, for me not returning it. Still, the compelling urge I had to get home and read about this newly discovered dignitary overrode every sense of catechistic decency I had.
Over the next four nights, I secretly read The Little Prince in bed, under my blanket, by flashlight, so as to not be discovered for being in false possession of it. On Monday evening, April 1,1968, I completed it and by doing so, learned a lesson that permanently altered who I am. It is the world’s most elusive enigma, one revealed by the fox to The Little Prince:
“Here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eyes.”
Three days later it was Thursday, April 4,1968, a day indelibly etched in the memory of America, the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. As a child trying to comprehend the meaning of what felt to be an incredibly important book, I was also trying to process the cataclysmic event that had just occurred. After speaking to my parents and other adults and coming to understand the magnitude of the man and the moment, I realized that the secret contained in The Little Prince was the virtue King lived by, a virtue that largely remains occluded by the cataracts of our nation.
Following the tragedy, for the first time in my life I felt conviction, for it was then, at that young age, that I made a Cub Scout pledge to see people with the vision of my heart and not be blinded by the sight of my eyes. I wanted to see “rightly”. It was also then that I decided to become a writer. I remember thinking that one day, I wanted to write a book that would make another child feel and think as I did, after reading The Little Prince. Since 1968, I have read that book at least once a year.
I did return the book. No one was punished for having lost it. I am still living to see “rightly”. The current tragedies gripping the nation’s attention bear proof of our continued blindness to what is essential. I hope that many individuals, who now also know the secret as I have shared it, will likewise pledge to see others with the vision of their hearts, as King died trying to get the nation to do.