Perhaps this is dumb: the idea that true art can't make money, that creative people need to have hustles. The writing I do to make money doesn't always align with the writing I do to survive.
#The little prince boa constrictor full
The grown-up world is often full of strange compromises and sacrifices you have to make. The young artist in the story decides to abandon his craft at the age of 6, because he doesn't think he'll be able to create what he wants to create, the way he wants to create it.Īs someone who has always wanted to write (but also be able to eat and live), I can understand this impulse to give up art entirely. How old would I have been? At what age do we stop seeing the elephant inside of the boa constrictor? It must happen like tiny pin pricks and not all at once. I don't remember when I stopped understanding things. Perhaps because we've all grown into "reasonable" people who are used to having things explained to us. They never ask me, though, why I didn't use the young artist's first drawing as the model for my tattoo. Sometimes my tattoo requires an explanation, but most people who have read Le Petit Prince know where the elephant inside of a boa constrictor comes from. "Then I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so the grown-ups could understand." The second drawing that inspired my tattoo. To help grown-ups better understand what he was trying to do, he made a second drawing to show the inside of the snake-this way everyone could clearly see the elephant. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant."īut all the grown-ups mistook the child's drawing for a hat. He only wanted to show the exterior of the snake, its body contorted to fit the shape of the elephant swallowed whole. That's not how the young artist in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince originally intended to present his drawing.
If I could have gotten my tattoo when I was a kid, I wouldn't have needed to show the elephant within the stomach of a boa constrictor.
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