The hardest book I've ever read, has a child as the protagonist

The Little Prince does not console; it destroys and rebuilds those who dare to look within themselves. Saint-Exupéry did not write for children; he wrote for adults who have already lost their souls.

 They sold us a children’s story. We leaf through it tenderly, give it as gifts for newborns, and quote it lightly. But The Little Prince is not a book for childhood; it is an X-ray of the human soul, an autopsy performed with a colored pencil. What Saint-Exupéry wrote was not a fable, but a mirror. And mirrors, when truly looked into, are feared.

 I read it several times during my childhood and adolescence. However, the crushing blow came one night when I decided to read it in a whispered voice to my son, who was in his second year of life, in his room, by the dim light of a small lamp that made the literature legible. He, for his part, was lying in his crib, preparing for sleep.

 I never imagined that I would end up reading to myself. Each paragraph tore me apart with the elegance of a truth that does not need to shout. I found myself crying—not because of the story, but because of what it revealed to me: that modern human beings are exactly the opposite of that child from another planet. He seeks meaning; we seek utility. He cares; we exploit. He observes; we dismiss.

 The king, the vain man, the tippler, the businessman, the lamplighter, the geographer... they are not characters; they are us. All of us. The king who gives orders to the sun to feel important. The vain man who only listens to applause. The tippler who drinks to forget his shame. The businessman who believes he owns the universe because he has counted it. The lamplighter who repeats without thinking.

Saint-Exupéry did not describe us; he exposed us.

The cruelty of the book lies in its gentleness. There is no blood or shouting; there is a child asking "Why?" And that "why" disarms us because we know we have no answer. Adulthood—that chronic disease of the soul—stole our capacity for wonder and replaced it with the habit of feigning wisdom. We pretend to know how to love, we pretend to know how to live, we pretend to understand. But deep down, we are lost in a desert without coordinates.

 The fox said it all: "To tame is to create ties."

 A cursed word in the contemporary world, where ties are seen as chains and freedom is confused with loneliness. Taming requires time, attention, dedication. But we measure time, we sell attention, and we avoid dedication. We want immediate connections, love on sale, disposable friendships. We do not know how to tame or how to let ourselves be tamed, and that is why we do not know how to love.

 And the rose—that fragile, vain, and unpredictable rose—is the true test of fire. Because to love is to care even when it hurts. But caring is not profitable, and everything that does not yield a return ends up being abandoned.

 Roses wither from neglect, not from malice.

 Saint-Exupéry shouts this to us without raising his voice: we are not cruel out of perversity, or at least I try to believe it. I repeat this idea to myself with obstinacy, like a prayer that I strive to uphold and implore, although doubt insistently knocks. And, at times, I fear he might be right. Innocently, I force myself to think that we are cruel only by distraction, by clumsiness... but every day it costs me a little more to convince myself of it. And why, you might ask? Because I see and live it every day; it materializes in the human acts that appear before me, whether they are minor or significant. I witness it live and direct; or perhaps it is simply my bad luck, my bad temper for not possessing the patience of the wise and the understanding of superior beings, capable of empathy.

 In the end, The Little Prince is the fiercest portrait of a humanity that forgot how to look. And the worst thing is that we laugh at its purity, like someone who mocks an innocent. We find it naive because we are already contaminated. But there is nothing more powerful than an innocent who sees clearly.

 I have been and am all of them: the vain person who seeks recognition, the king who gives orders so as not to feel useless, the lamplighter who repeats routines, the geographer who collects data without experiencing them. I have been the adult who hides behind reason to avoid feeling. I confess. Because before pointing at the world, one must point at one's own chest, where sensation and the explosion of emotional impacts that elevate us or plunge us into darkness materialize in that area of the body. You surely know what I am talking about.

 The Little Prince does not console me; it humbles me. It forces me to look at myself and admit that I have failed in the essential. It reminds me that it is not enough to be good if one does not act with kindness. That it is useless to have faith if one does not care. That love is not just a word, it is a decision, and the correct thing would be to practice it constantly, even if one is perceived as naive or utopian. That childhood is not lost: it is abandoned.

 Perhaps that is why the Little Prince never returned. Because upon arriving on Earth, he understood that it was the sickest planet: the only one where intelligence serves to justify selfishness. Perhaps he could not bear the idea of becoming one of us. Perhaps he knew that here, innocence dies by suffocation.

 Saint-Exupéry did not write for children. He wrote for adults who no longer know how to cry, for those who replaced tenderness with irony and silence with noise. His book does not heal: it confronts. It is the most brutal text ever written because it does not accuse with anger, but with sweetness. And there is no harsher whip than sweetness when it reminds us of what we have ceased to be.

 So yes: The Little Prince is the most terribly harsh book I have ever read. Because it destroys. Because it exposes the fraud that we are. And because, when it ends, it leaves a crack impossible to ignore. A crack that, if we are lucky, might be the beginning of our reconstruction.

 But that crack, if you look at it calmly, doesn't just hurt because of what it reveals—it hurts because it gives you back something you had lost: tenderness. And therein lies the trap.

 You think you are reading a story, and suddenly you find yourself facing yourself, a child again, with empty hands and the certainty that somewhere along the way you let something that was yours and that you should never have lost die.

 You close the book, look at the sky, and understand that nothing you loved is entirely lost, but neither is it entirely alive. And that awareness—that soft and cruel pang—is the most beautiful proof that you can still feel.