“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them” -- The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
When I mean to apologize to my children for being a big, clodding grown-up who doesn't understand things like I ought to anymore, I pull out Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince and read the first few chapters.
Inevitably when we get to the end, there are tears--my own among them.
In my haste to list all of the books I've read in my researches for Djinn, I forgot to list The Little Prince. But it is a fantasy that takes place in the desert, is it not?
"It's a metaphor," I tell my children. "The part about the plane is true: the author really did crash in the desert and nearly died of thirst. But the Prince is a metaphor: he represents the author's own self, or his soul. The rose is the author's wife, his beloved. And the planet's each represent how people have their own little worlds..."
I think books are most beautiful when they work on two different levels at once. We can appreciate the Little Prince as a tiny roving alien looking for life in the desert and as a metaphor for the innocence of childhood. The ambiguity makes a space for each reader (or bedside listener) to decide on their own what the story "really" means, 140 million different versions created by human minds.
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