Circling Between Oblivion and the Stars, a Poet of Flight Calls to Us : Saint-Exupery: ‘The Little Prince’ author vanished 50 years ago this weekend in wartime service to France.

Fifty years ago this weekend, French author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery took off on a World War II reconnaissance mission over the south of France and never came back. In America he is remembered for “The Little Prince,” the classic fable of childhood. But in Europe, North Africa and South America, where he pioneered air routes, he is revered as a great poet of flight.

At the dawn of aviation, Saint-Exupery set out to explore the planet; he frequently lost his physical bearings but never his capacity for wonder. He combined courage and sensitivity, traits today’s men are struggling to reconcile.

Once, flying blind across the Sahara at night, he navigated toward a mirage of Berber campfires, only to discover that they were stars rising above the horizon. He flew on, navigating by constellations, until he encountered the “bewildering fact that this Earth that is our home is yet in truth a wandering star.”

Flying in the 1935 Paris-to-Saigon race, he and his mechanic crashed in the Egyptian desert; they trudged three days through burning sands before being rescued. Saint-Exupery defied typhoons in Tierra del Fuego and flew reconnaissance sorties during the Nazi invasion of France. A romantic, he loved metaphors and florid language, princes and stars; today, we might say he was in touch with the child inside.

Born into a noble family in 1900, the young count endured boarding school by indulging fantasies of flying. In 1926 he was an aviator flying the mail across the Western Sahara from Casablanca to Dakar. His insights on these long, lonely flights found their way into his personal journals, scribbled in cafes and desert oases. He described the currents of air, the textures of terrain, the fingerprints left by nomads on nature. Carried aloft in primitive machines that frequently ran out of gas, lost course or crashed, he was engaged in a quest of consciousness: to grasp, from high above, a pattern of meaning on Earth.

The dawn of global awareness is often ascribed to the moment astronauts first beheld Earth shimmering in space. But Neil Armstrong’s words from the moon, “one small step for man . . . ,” pale in comparison to Saint-Exupery’s 1939 rendering of a colleague’s passage across the South Atlantic in a hydroplane:

“As day was dying he ran afoul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. . . . Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tips, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way . . . flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple.”

Saint-Exupery held faith with technological progress, believing air travel and air mail would bring countries closer together. But the Nazi invasion of France caused him to despair that the beloved airplane, with all its potential for communication, had instead regressed to weapon of destruction. He flew reconnaissance missions but refused to pilot fighter aircraft. He was nearly shot down in 1940, an experience he converted into “Flight to Arras.”

“The Little Prince” was written in a Victorian mansion deep in the woods of Long Island. Saint-Exupery had gone there for a rest but he couldn’t stand the isolation. Twice as old as the typical military flier, his body wracked by injuries, he returned to North Africa to help liberate France.

“If I’m shot down, I won’t regret anything,” Saint-Exupery wrote before his final mission in an unmailed letter to a friend. His P-38 Lightning was presumed lost in the Mediterranean; it remains a mystery whether he was shot down, crashed or, in growing despondency, committed suicide.

Today, as we talk of information highways and virtual reality making it possible to travel without leaving our TV screens, Saint-Exupery’s writings are a guide back to the path of the explorer who risked his life searching for knowledge and truth.

In the 50 years since his disappearance, Saint-Exupery’s literary reputation has stayed aloft. “The Little Prince” has been republished in a special anniversary edition. His aviation books, “Night Flight,” “Wind, Sand and Stars” and “Flight to Arras”--all still in print--are guideposts to explore meaning in life’s journey. Saint-Exupery was not only a pioneer of air routes; he was one of the first in modern times to grasp a whole-Earth vision. Circling somewhere between oblivion and the stars, the poet of flight challenges us “to set our course for distant destinations.”