Wind, Sand And Stars (Harvest Book)

There is a school of thought, dominant among most folks I’ve associated with as an adult, that life can be sort of measured. That one can tally the benefit of different courses of action and in that way rationally move through life. It’s the sort of thing one hears in an economics lecture or a business school career center. But also the sort of thing one talks about with their friends over Sunday brunch, this career advancement or that house in the suburbs. It all feels quite sensible.

This book, in which an early 20th century pilot details his adventures, rejects the utilitarian dream of modern life and does so both uniquely and convincingly. His critique has several components

First, the author suggests modernity has removed older forms of meaning and that we must first create new ones before we can begin to know what to prefer. That technological progress and creature comforts, though transformative, cannot be the ends in themselves.

Our progress has wrought a fresh world. Not bereft of meaning but grasping at meaning from another world. “To grasp the meaning of the world today, we use a language created to express the world of yesterday”. We are like “colonial soldiers who found an empire” the “meaning of life is conquest” but the “time has now come when we must be colonists, we must make this house habitable.” As we live now, we take “no heed to ask ourselves why we race” for the “race itself is more important than the conquest”. We “despise the colonist” forgetting that the “very aim of our conquest was the settling of this same colonist.”

The “mechanical civilization is not the enemy of the spiritual civilization” rather we must recognize the mechanical revolution has made us “young peoples without tradition or a language of our own”. “The past seems truer to our natures because it is nearer our language.”

To the author, it is obvious that modernity is not the death of meaning, but rather a clean slate upon which we must build again. He views the utility calculator not so much as doing the math wrong as substituting math for meaning. The language of the conqueror for the language of the colonist.


Second, the author highlights the transformative power of personal experience, in particular of extreme circumstances.

He tells the story of flying through a cyclone. Of complete engagement required to survive. Something that touched him deeper than mere drama, a “relic of human relations.” Something visceral and spiritual that revealed, through sensation, something of what it means to be alive. The sort of thing we studiously avoid.

He further points out that the aviator gains an understanding that humans lie to ourselves. We “have elected to believe that our planet was merciful and fruitful” but a seconds flight from any large city reveals the “essential foundation of rock and sand and salt in which here and there from time to time life like a little moss in the crevices of ruins has risked its precarious existence.”

He gives another experience of crash landing in the desert without water. He describes a 48 hour period in which he nearly dies. He suddenly “understood the cigarette and glass of rum that are handed to the criminal about to be executed. I used to think that for a man to accept these at the foot of the gallows was beneath human dignity. Now I was learning that he took pleasure from them. People thought him courageous when he smiled as he smoked or drank. People could not see that his perspective had changed and that for him the last hour of life was life in itself.”

He sees in adventure something closer to what life is actually about. And something in comfort and drama at a distance that deprives us of that.

Third, he finds in adversity the makings of meaning

He provides two examples, one that I suspect has aged poorly of a particularly able French general who fights a long running war with Moors in North Africa, dealing them harsh defeats. One day he leaves, returning to France. It was after all for him just an assignment. His enemies “far from rejoicing, bewail his absence as if his departure has deprived the desert of one of its magnetic poles and their existence a part of their prestige.”

In another example he speaks of the tendency of bombardment during the Spanish civil war to produce, not hopelessness, but rather to “fortify something in the town” as if “each shell that fell upon Madrid” “caused men to corns their fists and… join together”. “The blow resounded on the anvil. A giant smith was forging Madrid”

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in looking at each other but in looking outward in the same direction” and that “one’s essential manhood comes alive at the sight of self-sacrifice, cooperative effort, a rigorous vision of justice, manifested in an anarchist cellar in Barcelona.”

Fourth, he finds modern organization cuts off access to meaning

That “there are two hundred million men in Europe whose existence has no meaning and who yearn to come alive. Industry has torn them from the idiom of their present lineage and locked them in enormous ghettos that are like railway yards heaped with blackened trucks.”

That “once it was believed that to bring these creatures to manhood it was enough to feed them, clothe them, and look to their everyday needs.” But that has proven a shallow lie. That such things make men live but do not make them alive. That some “imagine themselves wide because they are indifferent, but that everything in the world gives lie to their wisdom.”

He tells us to let ourselves feel this hunger for adventure. To “send pontoons out into the night” for “the birth of man is not yet accomplished.” And that it is the very lack of creativity of these knowing men that will stamp out the vitality that lives in the next generation. The sight “of Mozart murdered”.


All of this makes the authors points sound a bit more logical than they really are. This is an adventure book and the author wants you to feel a bit of what he has felt. What a treat.