Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Antoine de Saint-Exupery - from "Letter to a Hostage"

“…lulled by the comings and goings of the deferential maid, we drank with the bargees like worshippers of the same church, although we could not say which one. One of the two bargees was Dutch. The other was German. The latter had previously fled the Nazis, pursued over there for being a Communist, or a Trotskyite, or a Catholic or a Jew. (I cannot recall for which label the man had been outlawed). But at that moment the bargee was far from being just a label. It was the man inside that mattered. The human essence. He was, quite simply, a friend. And we were in agreement, as friends. You agreed. I agreed. The bargees and the maid agreed. Agreed upon what? About the Pernod? About the meaning of life? About how pleasant the day was? We did not know how to express this either. But the depth of this agreement was so fully and solidly established, so biblical in its essence, even though impossible to put into words, that we would have gladly upheld this flag, sustained a siege and died behind machine guns to protect this essence.

What essence…? I have to admit it is difficult to explain! I fear I can only capture the reflections, not the essential elements. The inadequacy of my words will obscure my truth. It would be equivocal to claim that we would have readily fought for a certain quality of the bargees’ smile, and your smile and my smile, and the maid’s smile, which by some miracle of this sun, despite great adversity over so many millions of years, culminated, through us, in the quality of a convincing smile. As often as not the essential is weightless.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery - from "Letter to a Hostage"