Sep 25, 2020

It’s been a while since I read Le Petit Prince / The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. (Would really recommend if you haven’t! Public domain French and English PDFs available here.) One passage from the book has stuck with me very thoroughly, I think it is never quite absent from my subconscious thoughts:

Les grandes personnes aiment les chiffres. Quand vous leur parlez d’un nouvel ami, elles ne vous questionnent jamais sur l’essentiel. Elles ne vous disent jamais : « Quel est le son de sa voix ? Quels sont les jeux qu’il préfère ? Est-ce qu’il collectionne les papillons ? » Elles vous demandent : « Quel âge a-t-il ? Combien a-t-il de frères ? Combien pèse-t-il ? Combien gagne son père ? » Alors seulement elles croient le connaître. Si vous dites aux grandes personnes : « J’ai vu une belle maison en briques roses, avec des géraniums aux fenêtres et des colombes sur le toit… », elles ne parviennent pas à s’imaginer cette maison. Il faut leur dire : « J’ai vu une maison de cent mille francs. » Alors elles s’écrient : « Comme c’est joli ! »

Grown-ups love numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask you about the important matters. They never say: “What does his voice sound like? What games does he like? Does he collect butterflies?” But they ask: “How old is he? How many brothers does he have? How much does he weigh? How much does his father make?” Only then do they think that they’ve gotten to know him. If you tell the grown-ups, “I saw a beautiful house made of pink bricks, with geraniums in its windows and doves on its roof…”, they’ll never manage to picture the house. You have to tell them: “I saw a million-dollar house.” And then they’ll exclaim, “Oh, that’s a beauty!”

One of my favorite books as an elementary schooler was Go Figure! by Johnny Ball. It is “a totally cool book about numbers” (games, puzzles, history, math, big numbers, etc.) and I’m proud to say that I won first place in a book review contest by writing about it, by cramming an unruled sheet full of my love for numbers and my messy handwriting. But had I read Le Petit Prince then, would it have resonated with me? Is it that some part of the inner child was missing from me at the age of six but has been partially regained by the age of twenty?

Anyway, here’s a cute spread from the book that tries to answer the question, “What would our world look like without numbers?”