Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Face to face with the wind. Part 3. "Captain of the birds"
The pilot remained alive, and then five days and four nights in a forty-degree frost, climbing "through the passes at an altitude of four and a half thousand meters, having no ice ax, no rope, no food …"
Part I. "I come from childhood"
Part 2. In the nest of "Storks"
Every night I summarize the day I lived
It is not known whether Antoine summed up the day he lived on that evening, when, upon learning of his morning flight, Henri Guillaume knocked at him with a bottle of wine - an older friend, an experienced pilot-ass who became a friend and mentor of Tonio.
Subsequently, in the "Planet of Men" de Saint-Exupery will tell everything that happened to him on the eve of his first flight. From this book, written by a refined aristocrat and dedicated to the son of a peasant, Henri Guillaume, a world far from the problems of aviators will learn about the risks pilots put themselves at risk to transport several bags of mail from one continent to another.
Most of the aviation pioneers, like de Saint-Exupéry himself, were carriers of the urethral vector. Aviation, associated with constant risk, gave urethralists a stimulus to self-realization that they did not find on the ground.
The story of Henri Guillaume, an even more desperate urethral man than Antoine himself, is striking with a crazy passion for life. His plane crashed in the Chilean Andes on its way to Argentina. The pilot remained alive, and then five days and four nights in a forty-degree frost, climbing "through the passes at an altitude of four and a half thousand meters, having no ice ax, no rope, no food …" [A. de Saint-Exupery "Planet of the People"], made his way to the base.
Only will, the four-dimensional power of libido, impulsiveness and fervor brought the urethral people back to life, raised them from the dead when they were already “missing”, helped not to get lost in the desert, to return frostbitten, but alive from the bottomless mountain gorges.
“Man is freedom of choice and will,” says Yuri Burlan at his lectures on system-vector psychology. A person who is cut off from his flock, no matter where he is - on a desert island, in the Amazon jungle or in the Chilean Andes, while alive, always has a chance to change the situation for the better, a chance to survive at any cost.
We are responsible for those we have tamed
De Saint-Exupéry himself survived many accidents in the sands and in the fall of a test seaplane into the Mediterranean Sea. In the desert, he was rescued, dehydrated, by nomads. From the depths of the sea, the drowning pilot in an unconscious state was taken out by divers.
In 1943, Antoine, being far from occupied France, will write his famous lines: “We are responsible for those who have tamed” [A. de Saint-Exupery "The Little Prince"]. The key word here is "responsible". Such an understanding could only have occurred to the urethral. It is he who is driven by a sense of responsibility for the flock, for his people, for those who were, are and will be with him.
“But I told myself - if my wife believes that I am alive, she believes that I am going. And the comrades believe that I am going. They all believe in me. I'll be a scoundrel if I stop! " [AND. de Saint-Exupery "Planet of the people"]
In the harsh conditions of flights, technical breakdowns and plane crashes, in which French pilots from Aeropostal often fell, the thought that a squadron awaits them, relatives are looking for comrades, and the directors of the Line itself are already negotiating with the leaders of the wild militant tribes of nomads in the Sahara about the ransom and return of pilots, gave them the strength to survive.
In the new service at Aeropostal, the pilots constantly risked their lives. They plowed the ocean, and the Atlantic raged beneath them, the belly of their planes scratched against the mirror peaks of mountain ranges, and when falling in the Sahara, the propeller screwed deep into the sand. It was there that Antoine first discovered a real sense of camaraderie.
"I saw your plane …" - Guillaume said later. "How did you know it was me?" - "Nobody would dare to fly so low …" [A. de Saint-Exupery "Planet of the people"]
It was a special male friendship, not built on a collectively sublimated attraction. This happens in closed brotherhoods and secret orders, where everyone is bound by mutual responsibility and dead silence.
The flight crew existed according to the ancient urethral principle, thanks to which it was possible to "survive in the savannah." It sounded: "One for all and all for one!". Responsibility for the life of the other fell on each member of their little flight flock.
The "prodigal son" of noble relatives
Many biographers of Antoine de Saint-Exupery saw in the character of the pilot the traits of an adventurer and an adventurer. Most of them did not understand why the young aristocrat leaves Paris and goes into the unknown, where he is ready to risk his life every minute. Antoine did not need adrenaline and "strong sensations".
This is a doping for the skin, but not for the urethral. The pilot had a deficiency of a different nature. It was an urgent need to fill my inner psychological voids.
De Saint-Exupery already knew how to do this. He associated these shortcomings with creativity. When Antoine began to write for real, he felt a lack of themes, plots, experience, individual style. His hard and dangerous work in abundance gave him what he dreamed of.
If his urethral-sound deficits were not so painful, he would have lived his life in secular entertainment and tinsel, settling in a warm office in some reputable company where they pay well. And on weekends and holidays, he would amuse himself with aerial recklessness at the airfield in Orly or Le Bourget near Paris. It's also quite a risk. But the irrepressible nature of Saint-Ex demanded the naturalness and truth of life.
Mental anxiety and the search for the meaning of being led Antoine to the Line. The line first of all gave him a simple and strong sense of the fullness of life, the realization of what a person lives for, and satisfied his first sound hunger.
My home is a desert
In 1927, de Saint-Exupéry was appointed commander of the airfield at Cap Jubi. Aeropostal, together with the Line, developed a new route Casablanca - Dakar, and in the future they were going to stretch the air route across the Atlantic Ocean to South America. In the absence of radio communications and navigation devices, the pilots flew low above the ground, which made them an easy target for the Arab tribes of North Africa at war among themselves.
For the safety of the pilots soaring in the Sahara over the heads of the unconquered nomads, who managed to get a taste for the big money, for which the Line bought out the surviving but captured aviators, they decided to create intermediate landing points for aircraft in the desert.
They housed spare vehicles, ground and flight personnel, capable, if necessary, to immediately fly out in search of the missing plane or quickly repair the one that crashed. The head of such an aircraft technical station must be a brave person, capable of independently making adequate decisions, without waiting for commands and approvals from the mainland. One of these airfields was opened at Kap Jubi.
The reason for de Saint-Exupery's appointment there was that the route to Dakar passed over Spanish territory. The Spaniards did not pry into the possession of the warring North African savages and did not particularly like the French. It was here that an educated, diplomatic and titled person was needed, capable of winning the sympathy of the Governor of Cap Jubi and avoiding international conflicts. Antoine turned out to be the most suitable figure.
Captain of the birds
Here, in Western Sahara, completely devoid of greenery, located at a distance of several tens of miles from the Canary Islands, from where a tiny steamer once a month brought food and fresh water, Antoine de Saint-Exupery settled, who received the nickname "Captain of the birds" from the local aborigines.
The most terrible thing in this place forgotten by civilization was the almost complete absence of human communication. This circumstance would have upset anyone but Saint-Ex. The desert was quite suitable for exercises in concentration of the mind and reflection. To a certain extent, Antoine was even glad that he fled to North-West Africa, to the un-promised land.
At the same time, he, a man from civilization, was not at all burdened with everyday asceticism, with which he calmly lived for many months. The furnishings of the barracks, attached to the hangar, in which the "ambassador" of France to the Sahara lived, consisted of a plank bed with a thin straw mattress. The door, placed on two empty gas barrels, replaced the airport manager's desk.
“I am famous among the children of the desert … I arrange receptions for the leaders. And they invite me two kilometers away into the desert for a cup of tea in their tents. Not a single Spaniard has ever reached this place. And I will climb further, risking nothing, as the Arabs begin to recognize me”[A. de Saint-Exupery from a letter to his mother].
The big white man felt quite comfortable in the company of primitive, by European standards, "children of the Sahara." He, not inclined to learn languages, and barely speaking German and English, nevertheless managed to find a common language with the desert thugs, who more than once helped him search for pilots who had crashed in the Sahara. Urethral Saint-Exupery instilled a sense of security and safety not only for his colleagues, local nomads recognized him as a "white leader".
A person gives from himself what he can and to whom he can
There was another reason why Saint-Exupery was wanted to be removed from flights. This reason was his legendary absent-mindedness, which has long become the talk of the town. Antoine was an excellent pilot, but during the monotonous hours of the flight he plunged into such a deep sonic outlook that he forgot that he was in the air at an altitude of many hundreds of meters, that he was entrusted with the lives of his comrades and rare passengers on board. In such hours of lonely "hovering" between heaven and earth, in his brain, there was intense work aimed at thinking over the next plot or new invention.
The deep concentration within himself explains his phenomenal sound forgetfulness. Antoine could go on a flight, connected to an empty gas tank, without slamming the cockpit door, without removing the chassis. The Line feared that the dreamy Antoine would fall out of the cockpit, losing control. What does the urethral sound engineer care about all these trifles if an unlimited heavenly space and the opportunity to remain face to face with the wind await him. Is a body that hurts after multiple accidents and only distracts from thinking has value?
The sound engineer is able to completely disconnect from the outside world, which turns into an illusory reality for him. De Saint-Exupery's contemporaries recalled that he was always at odds with the times. He confused dates, numbers, landing locations and runways. The sound engineer, immersed in his inner world, does not determine the length of time and its division into day, night, week, month, year, eternity.
Maybe life on the edge of the Sahara was so attractive for Antoine because, as in childhood, there was no sense of time and space in it. There was no need to break "for the flags", as it happened to him in densely populated stuffy Paris. There were simply no restrictions in the Sahara.
Thanks to the "consul of the desert" Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the physical state borders between France and Spain, social differences between the tribes of wild nomads and the French aristocrat were "erased" on the Black Continent.
The management of the Line, appointing de Antoine Saint-Exupéry as the head of the intermediate airport in Cap Jubi, saved the pilot from premature death, saving the great writer, philosopher and inventor to mankind.
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