Antoine de Saint Exupery
"A man is free when he is using a spade."

Antoine de Saint Exupery was a pioneer aviator and writer. His works (in English translation) include Night Flight, The Little Prince and Wind, Sand and Stars, for which he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Academie Francaise. De Saint Exupery disappeared on an air mission during the Second World War.

Wind, Sand and Stars tells of the early air postal service. In a chapter titled "The Men", the author recalled his fellow pilots. One friend, Guillaumet, crashed in the high Andes in the middle of the Chilean winter. No one had hope for his survival.

But Guillaumet did survive. "I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through," he declared. He endured nearly a week of desperate passage through the mountains, without food, at conditions as extreme as 15,000 feet altitude and daytime temperatures twenty degrees below zero.

There came a moment when Guillaumet surrendered and began the merciful descent toward death. Then he thought of his wife. If he simply vanished, she would not collect his insurance money for many years. He struggled forward to die on a place where his body might be found. And struggled for days more.

Guillaumet had:

...a quality which is nameless. It may be gravity, but the word does not satisfy me, for the quality I have in mind can be accompanied by the most cheerful gaiety. It is the quality of a carpenter face to face with his block of wood. He handles it, he takes its measure. Far from treating it frivolously, he summons all his professional virtues to do it honor.
De Saint Exupery remembered another man who had similar qualities:
He was a gardener, and he was speaking on his deathbed: You know, I used to sweat sometimes when I was digging. My rheumatism would pull at my leg, and I would damn myself for a slave. And now, do you know, I'd like to spade and spade. It's beautiful work. A man is free when he is using a spade. And besides, who is going to prune my trees when I am gone.
[Lewis Galantiere, translator; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers]
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All materials copyright by Robert Kovsky, 1997.