Good Science Writing (1) ….

…is where you find it.

I mostly know Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from The Little Prince – which I’ve tried a couple of times on my now-seven year old. He’s not ready for it yet, or perhaps I should just try again; the combination of melancholy and strangeness has been hard for him to deal with so far.
But just seeing the name reminded me that I’ve never read the stuff he was very famous for back in the day, his memoirs of flying. I was looking for Night Flight, probably the most famous of those works, but as it happened I picked up Wind, Sand and Stars.

I’m enjoying the book enormously, wondering what took me so long to get to it. Saint-Exupéry’s writing is a blend of the ecstatic/romantic and an incredibly sharp and unsentimental view of the interplay between a man and his machines. I’ll blog about that later – his chapter “The Tool” is a much needed slap in the face of every hysteric complaint about “dehumanizing” technology, but there was another passage that knocked me off my feet a couple of nights ago.

In this one, Saint-Exupéry writes about what he saw when he was forced down on a geological island in the middle of the Sahara. He had landed his airplane on the flat top of a bit of a collapsed plateau. He wrote:

Without question I was the first human being ever to wander over this…this iceberg; [ellipsis in the original] its sides were remarkably steep, no Arab could have climbed them, and no European had as yet ventured into this wild region.

I was thrilled by the virginity of a soil which no step of man or beast had sullied. I lingered t here, startled by this silence that never had been broken. The first star began to shine, and I said to myself that this pure surface had lain here thousands of years in sight only of the stars.

But suddenly my musing on this white sheet and these shining stars were endowed with a singular significance. I had kicked against a hard, black stone, the size of a man’s fist, a sort of moulded rock of lava incredibly present on the surface of a bed of shells a thousand feet deep. A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. Never had a stone fallen from the skies made known its origins so unmistakably

And very naturally, raising my eyes, I said to myself that from the height of t his celestial apple-tree there must have dropped other fruits, and that I should find them exactly where they fell, since never from the beginning of time had anything been present to displace them.

Excited by my adventure, I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about at he rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. The marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.

Look at what Saint-Exupéry was able to do here: he caught “the grandeur of this view of life” – the poetry available to someone paying close attention to what actually lies before his eyes. He created one of the clearest images I can recall in science writing to explain his inference that the anomalous rock he found was actually a meteorite. He showed, rather than told, how he tested the hypothesis – or better, the process of inference – of an extra-planetary origin for the rock. He systematized his results. And then he tied it all back to what remains the central delight of science: the fact that order in the material world can be detected and explored by the human mind.

People don’t think of Saint-Exupéry as a science writer, and too many don’t credit the genre with the capacity to become art. The above is the single necessary counter-example.

Q.E.D.

Image: Postcard of the Blériot IX monoplane. Note: this is not Saint Exupéry’s plane. This a pre-World War I design; Saint Exupéry’s flying experience described in Wind Sand and Stars began in 1926. I just liked the image. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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