'A cloth spread under an apple tree can catch only apples', wrote
Antoine de Saint Exupery in Terre des hommes (Land of Men),
(English title: Wind, Sand and Stars), 'and a cloth spread under
stars can catch only stardust ...What was most marvellous was that,
there, standing on the planet's rounded back, between this magnetic
cloth and those stars, was a man's consciousness in which that
star-fall could be reflected as in a mirror.' And a few pages
further on he writes: 'I was but a mere mortal lost between sand
and stars, aware simply of the sweet pleasure of breathing.' From
the author of those lines to the writer of the first well known
verses of the Bible: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and
the earth ...', stretch centuries of time and an intellectual and
cultural abyss as well. What could there be in common between the
pilot of the first air route from Toulouse to Dakar and the direct
descendants of Semitic nomads? Certainly not much, but for those
star-pierced nights that deserts alone can offer for contemplation,
combined with the tormenting question: what a thing is man,
confronted by the cosmos, magnificent and terrible at the same
time? This question has been haunting humanity from the beginning
and gnaws at each of us: 'Who am I? Where did I come from? Where
does my destiny lie?' To these questions, the desert dwellers, and
the aviator lost like all their brothers in humanity, have given
the same response. Certainly we are mortal beings, lost in the
middle of the cosmos as in a desert, crushed by the weight of
reality as by the immense celestial vault. And yet, we are unique,
singular, irreplaceable; we are not less than the consciousness of
the world, and, believers among them will say, we are even created
in the image of God. Is that courage or lack of awareness,
pretentiousness or faith?
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