Word: saint
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...WISDOM OF THE SANDS (350 pp.)-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry-Harcourt, Brace...
...best writing to be found in the five-inch shelf of flying literature was done by French Airman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Night Flight, Wind, Sand and Stars, Flight to Arras). He was that rare 20th Century blend, a courageous man of action whose deepest values were spiritual. On his long airmail flights over desert and ocean, and on military missions over doomed France in 1940, his brooding imagination conceived a vision of life in which God, soul and the brotherhood of man shone through and outweighed all commonplace striving...
...Questions . . ." Airman Saint-Exupéry left behind him an unpublished testament. Now ably translated into English by British Francophile Stuart Gilbert, The Wisdom of the Sands can be read as a partial blueprint of the moral and ethical world Saint-Ex envisioned. As with most such plottings of mystical patterns, it is a hard one to follow, in this century or any other. In Wisdom, Saint-Ex imagines himself as a desert prince sharing his accumulated wisdom with his subjects (he loved the Sahara and the tradition-ruled life of its people). He is a benevolent despot, brave, warlike...
Next day in Paris the Interior Ministry instructed Saint-Junien's postmaster to deliver no mail addressed to the Boulevard Staline. Mayor Pascaud countered by adding the old Boulevard Gambetta signs to the new Boulevard Staline signs, thus giving the street two names. Then, just before the start of the first game of the rugby season, six members of the local team went on strike, refusing to play ball in the stadium. "We didn't come here to play politics," explained Center Forward Jean Colombier. "Le sport est mort a Saint-Junien," sobbed a heartbroken referee...
That night 60 members of the local sports club assembled in a café to protest the new name on Saint-Junien's stadium and sent a deputation out to pull down the wooden sign. The following day Mayor Pascaud ordered a new sign put up. During the night that one too was pulled down. For five days and nights this maneuver was repeated. Last week the Communist mayor of Saint-Junien issued an order. Henceforth, he said, a municipal employee would hang a sign reading "Stade Maurice Thorez" on the stadium each morning and take it down each...