Transcriber: Chiara Terzaroli Reviewer: Maurício Kakuei Tanaka
(French) All grown-ups were children first,
but only a few of them remember it.
(English) All grown-ups were children first,
but only a few of them remember it.
Does anyone know where this sentence is from?
This line is from “Le Petit Prince,” or “The Little Prince,”
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
This is my favorite line in the book.
As we all know, we all have a time when we were such a small child.
I also have my time, a time when I was just a little kid.
And now, looking at myself with the age of 17,
makes me think about being an adult.
I’m not a kid anymore, but I’m not fully a grown-up either.
And so today I’m going to talk about how I think about getting to be a grown-up
in the point of a 17-year-old student
by looking through the novel “The Little Prince.”
In “The Little Prince,” the little prince says that adults love numbers.
And when we think about it, we can easily understand his words.
Carefully listen to the conversation
of the adults.
Literally, almost everything is valued with numbers.
If your house is $1,000 more expensive than mine,
then your house is better.
It is clearly very easy to understand and empathize
with the little prince’s words.
But let’s think about it.
Why?
When we ask little kids the value of their house,
they do not answer with numbers.
But when this little kid grows up, he answers just like adults.
Why?
After a few chapters, the little prince meets the drinker.
The little prince asks the man,
“Why do you drink so much?”
And the man answers,
“The reason why I drink
is because it lets me forget the sense of shamefulness.”
The little prince asks another question to him,
“What makes you feel so shameful?”
And to this question,
the man answers by saying that the reason he feels shameful
is because he drinks so much.
This character,
the drinker from the third star the little prince visits,
symbolizes the complex and contradictory inner world of adults.
The children find it difficult to understand,
contradictory and complex.
Everyone, even the drunkard, knows that the logic is totally wrong.
But people who are old enough
can understand what the man is talking about.
What is this complexity all about?
Being an adult means everything.
An untainted kid who lived under protection
and love of his parents and teachers
grows up to be an adult.
And as an adult,
because he’s now a grown-up,
he has to give love to his children,
provide protection,
teach important values and morals,
and be responsible about everything,
not because he wanted to, but because he had to.
The society was asking him to do so,
and he had to,
because he wasn’t a kid anymore.
To get used to the life as an adult,
he adapts to it,
putting himself out to the side.
Living like that for years,
he becomes an adult and loses what he originally was.
He does all of this without even noticing that he has done all of this.
You may still not understand the adults who look so cold-blooded,
or you may state that you feel sympathy for them.
But here is what I want to say to all adults and children
as an ordinary person with an age right between those two.
Like the line I brought from “The Little Prince,”
we were all children,
but many adults do not remember that they were children.
I want to say to all adults who provide me with such warm love and protection,
“Do not forget the time
when you were so young, untainted, and pure.
Remember yourself and do not lose it.
You don’t have to put it aside.”
Thank you.