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I relate to this book. How many men have locked themselves inside aluminum ships to traverse the skies? Glowing dials of instruments light up your cockpit, the vibrations of engine(s), the eddies of wind, the lights of St. Elmo’s Fire on your props, we remain transfixed to the glorious view of the firmament from our lofty aircraft positions.
This book retells the nascent airmail routes over the Moors, over the Sahara, crash landing in the Andes, civil war in Spain. How could you tell it better?
You should read this book. If not for the last chapter alone, the intimate glimpse of a nation set against each other, the fascists and socialist in Spain.
The high-up doctors and priest class of corporate science, they put your children in a face mask and forced onto the working people a diabolical “treatment”.
All academic bastards, doctors, corporate lawyers, and poly-tricksters- you have already lost. Save yourself before it’s too late.
Truly one of my most treasured reading experiences of middle aged life. Sorry I didn’t read this book many years ago.
Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Some of my highlights:
Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Book last read: 2023-04-02 21:36:25
Percentage read: 100%
Chapter 4: I. The Craft
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Chapter progress: 3.7%
Highlight: Already I was beginning to realize that a spectacle has no meaning except it be seen through the glass of a culture, a civilization, a craft.
Chapter 4: I. The Craft
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Chapter progress: 7.41%
Highlight: You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois
Chapter 4: I. The Craft
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Chapter progress: 9.26%
Highlight: And with that we knew ourselves to be lost in interplanetary space among a thousand inaccessible planets, we who sought only the one veritable planet, our own,
that planet on which alone we should find our familiar countryside, the houses of our friends, our treasures.
Chapter 5: II. The Men
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Chapter progress: 12.35%
Highlight: They had given him a plane whose absolute ceiling was sixteen thousand feet and had asked him to fly it over a mountain range that rose more than twenty thousand feet into the air.
Chapter 5: II. The Men
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Chapter progress: 14.2%
Highlight: It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the
Chapter 5: II. The Men
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Chapter progress: 14.2%
Highlight: We forget that there is no hope of joy except in human relations.
Notes: Metaverse downer.
Chapter 5: II. The Men
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Chapter progress: 14.81%
Highlight: Sitting in the flickering light of the candles on this kerchief of sand, on this village square, we waited in the
night. We were waiting for the rescuing dawn—or for the Moors. Something, I know not what, lent this night a savor of Christmas. We told stories, we joked, we sang songs. In the air there was that slight fever that reigns over a gaily prepared feast. And yet we were infinitely poor. Wind, sand, and stars. The austerity of Trappists. But on this badly lighted cloth, a handful of men who possessed nothing in the world but their memories were sharing invisible riches.
Notes: A.o.g.
Chapter 5: II. The Men
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Chapter progress: 19.14%
Highlight: What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.
Chapter 5: II. The Men
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Chapter progress: 19.75%
Highlight: He knows that once men are caught up in an event they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.
Chapter 6: III. The Tool
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Chapter progress: 20.99%
Highlight: In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away,
Chapter 6: III. The Tool
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Chapter progress: 21.6%
Highlight: By what sign do they recognize the inhumanity of the machine?
Chapter 6: III. The Tool
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Chapter progress: 21.6%
Highlight: the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
Chapter 6: III. The Tool
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Chapter progress: 22.22%
Highlight: Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures—in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together. Do our dreamers hold that the invention of writing, of printing, of the sailing ship, degraded the human spirit?
Notes: E plurbis unum. Straight to hell.
Chapter 6: III. The Tool
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Chapter progress: 22.22%
Highlight: But how can anyone conceive that the machine is an end? It is a tool.
Notes: Do not worship tool.
Chapter 6: III. The Tool
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Chapter progress: 22.22%
Highlight: I quite agree that men lose their creative instincts when they are fed thus without raising a hand. And I can see that it is tempting to accuse industry of this evil.
Notes: Face mask wearing bafoons.
Chapter 6: III. The Tool
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Chapter progress: 22.84%
Highlight: The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.
Chapter 7: IV. The Elements
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Chapter progress: 24.07%
Highlight: Family treasures painfully collected in a lifetime of poverty, pitiful mementoes so alike that nobody but their owners could have told them apart, had lost their identity and lapsed into chaos, into anonymity, into an amorphous magma.
Chapter 7: IV. The Elements
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Chapter progress: 24.69%
Highlight: A hard blue sky that shone over the scraped and barren world while the fleshless vertebrae of the mountain chain flashed in the sunlight.
Notes: Geoagnetic pole shift.
Chapter 7: IV. The Elements
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Chapter progress: 25.93%
Highlight: I was wrestling with chaos, was wearing myself out in a battle with chaos, struggling to keep in the air a gigantic house of cards that kept collapsing despite all I could do.
Chapter 7: IV. The Elements
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Chapter progress: 26.54%
Highlight: apotheosis.
Chapter 7: IV. The Elements
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Chapter progress: 28.4%
Highlight: the sky became a slippery dome on which I could not find a footing.
Notes: the dome.
Chapter 7: IV. The Elements
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Chapter progress: 30.25%
Highlight: Yet we all know that together with the grain in the granaries, with the heritage of generations of men, with the treasures of families, it is the burning flesh of children and their elders that, dissipated in smoke, is slowly fertilizing those black cumuli.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 41.36%
Highlight: My dear chap, you’ll have to have a gun,” he said, and very kindly he gave me his. “And you’ll want these extra clips of cartridges,” he went on. “Just bear in mind that you shoot at anything and everything you see.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 43.21%
Highlight: Our surest protection was our poverty, our single enemy silence.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 44.44%
Highlight: it was that I had been able to read the anger of the desert in the beating wings of a dragonfly.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 44.44%
Highlight: Now and then an influential chief came up, and him, with the approval of the Line, we would load into the plane and carry off to see something of the world. The aim was to soften their pride, for, repositories of the truth, defenders of Allah, the only God, it was more in contempt than in hatred that he and his kind murdered their prisoners.
Notes: Airplane rides for chiefs.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 45.06%
Highlight: “In Paris,” they said, “you walk through a crowd of a thousand people. You stare at them. And nobody carries a rifle!”
Notes: What the Moors said of Paris. Lol
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 45.06%
Highlight: The plain fact was that they did not know enough to admire our technical progress. The wireless astonished them less than the telephone, since the mystery of the telephone resided in the very fact of the wire.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 45.06%
Highlight: What with everyone in Paris asking if the Louvre was not “very big” they had gradually learned that this was the answer that flattered us. And with a sort of vague contempt, as if pacifying a lot of children, they would grant that the Louvre was “very big.”
Notes: Natives in Paris.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 45.68%
Highlight: You know … the God of the French … He is more generous to the French than the God of the Moors is to the Moors.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 46.3%
Highlight: There was no question but that they would, by their submission, be materially better off.
Notes: biometric identification.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 48.15%
Highlight: he is to move at dawn impelled by a hatred that bears all the signs of love.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 48.15%
Highlight: He says you eat greens like the goat and pork like the pigs. Your wives are shameless and show their faces—he has seen them. He says you never pray. He says, what good are your airplanes and wireless and Bonnafous, if you do not possess the Truth?”
Notes: The Gentiles.
Chapter 10: VII. Men of the Desert
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Chapter progress: 50.62%
Highlight: But happy also the Sahara where day and night swing man so evenly from one hope to the other.
Notes: Night and day.
Chapter 11: VIII. Prisoner of the Sand
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Chapter progress: 55.56%
Highlight: Family cares, thoughts of income, concerns of the heart—all that vanished on the threshold of this room as at the door of a hermit’s cell, or an astronomer’s tower, or a radio operator’s shack. Here was one of those men who are able to lock themselves up in the secrecy of their retreat and hold discourse with the universe.
Notes: The wizard labratory.
Chapter 11: VIII. Prisoner of the Sand
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Chapter progress: 58.64%
Highlight: How empty of life is this planet of ours!
Notes: Somebody tell Bill Gates the good news.
Chapter 11: VIII. Prisoner of the Sand
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Chapter progress: 73.46%
Highlight: A man cannot live a decent life in cities, and I need to feel myself live.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 78.4%
Highlight: Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 78.4%
Highlight: In a civil war the firing line is invisible; it passes through the hearts of men.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 78.4%
Highlight: One man in misery can disrupt the peace of a city.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 79.01%
Highlight: After six thousand years the stones of a temple still vibrate with the passage of man; but a little rust, a night of rain, and this railway yard is eaten away to its very skeleton.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 79.01%
Highlight: I sat watching the disappearance in a ring of rifles of a man who five minutes before, within two feet of me, had crossed the invisible firing line.
Notes: Excellent description of social order.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 79.63%
Highlight: The purpose of this struggle was not to rid the country of an invading foreigner but to eradicate a plague. A new faith is like a plague. It attacks from within. It propagates in the invisible. Walking in the streets, whoever belongs to a Party feels himself surrounded by secretly infected men.
Notes: Wow.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 80.25%
Highlight: You have been captured. You are shot. Reason: your ideas were not our
Notes: Face mask death cult.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 80.86%
Highlight: Her life had been the grey slums, days spent in a factory, and the sordid compensation afforded by the cafes. Everything that went on here seemed to her as jolly as a picnic. She jumped down and ran to the village well. Probably she believed she was drinking at the very breast of mother earth.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 81.48%
Highlight: They recognize in him the nurseryman, or the pharmacist. And when they shoot the pharmacist,
Notes: Covid criminals.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 84.57%
Highlight: Waiting for an explosion is the longest passage of time I know.
Notes: Financial collapse.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 85.8%
Highlight: But men are like this: slowly but surely, ordeal fortifies their virtues.
Notes: Fake test. Fake virus.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 85.8%
Highlight: Horror causes men to clench their fists, and in horror men join together.
Notes: Fake pandemic.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 88.27%
Highlight: It was as if we were marrying our enemy before dying of his blow.
Notes: CDC absolution.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 89.51%
Highlight: I could not but remember that all of them had been ready to die with simplicity.
Notes: Fake pandemic. Fake vaccine.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 91.98%
Highlight: They talk about the call of duty, but what is it that makes the call of duty so pressing? What can you tell me, Sergeant, about that uneasiness that seeped in to disturb your peaceful existence?
Notes: The troops are all vacked.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 92.59%
Highlight: We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow.
Notes: Fake pandemic.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 93.21%
Highlight: Now you are free to gamble with death.
Notes: Death vax and face mask hell.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 93.21%
Highlight: We have to live a long time before we become men.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 93.83%
Highlight: Truth, for any man, is that which makes him a man.
Notes: The money is fake.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 94.44%
Highlight: But truth, we know, is that which clarifies, not that which confuses.
Notes: Fake pandemic. It was the flu.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 94.44%
Highlight: There is no profit in discussing ideologies.
Notes: Face mask death cult.
Chapter 12: IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
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Chapter progress: 96.91%
Highlight: What a mysterious ascension! From a little bubbling lava, from the vague pulp of a star, from a living cell miraculously fertilized, we have issued forth and have bit by bit raised ourselves to the writing of cantatas and the weighing of nebulae.
Chapter 13: X. Conclusion
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Chapter progress: 98.77%
Highlight: A deer, a gazelle, any animal grown old,
preserves its grace. What is it that corrupts this wonderful clay of which man is kneaded?
Notes: Grace is lost.