Quote 22
Once again I felt myself frozen by the sense of something irreparable. And I knew that I could not bear the thought of never hearing that laughter any more. For me, it was like a spring of fresh water in the desert. (26.31)
“Fresh water in the desert” is something you can’t do without—something you need to survive; it’s what you dream about in its absence. And all of that value and need sums up what the prince means to the narrator.
Quote 23
My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained. (1.6)
Usually, it would be the adults who say kids need to “see” more “clearly” in order to understand how things are. Instead, here we have a young person who thinks the adults are the ones who “need to have things explained.” What do you think is different between the way the young narrator and the adults see the world?
Quote 24
Whenever I met one of them [the grown-ups] who seemed to me at all clear-sighted, I tried the experiment of showing him my Drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I would try to find out, so, if this was a person of true understanding. But, whoever it was, he, or she, would always say:
“That is a hat.”
Then I would never talk to that person about boa constrictors, or primeval forests, or stars. (1.10-12)
The narrator ends up using his drawing as a friendship test for new people he meets. Although the narrator doesn’t know it yet, he’s asking people to see the drawing in the same way that the fox tells the prince to see the world: with the heart, not the eyes. Do you agree?