St.-Ex: “He is optimistic that man will come out on top of the machine”

August 5th, 1939 – from Anne Lindbergh’s journal – continued from this excerpt

I go ahead with supper, talking about Russia and aviation … He talks about desert flying, the variety it had, in the sands.

And I quote TE Lawrence saying that he liked the “variety of taste” in water. Water, which seemed so much alike to most people, had more variety than the Alps.

“Oui,” he says, “I felt just like him about the sands.”

He goes on to speak of the beauty of the desert and how enhanced it was by danger. He tells of returning on a flight over the desert when it was safe. It seemed to him flat and uninteresting until he was shot at — and then suddenly it was beautiful again.

…C. finally appears [This is Charles Lindbergh] … I drop back in relief, I am so glad he is there….He takes his supper on a tray and over the tray carries on the torch of conversation, which immediately goes up a level, takes on a higher, less feminine tone. [Notice how she belittles herself here, and how she belittles the feminine tone. It is not as “high”. This is just a guess, but I bet St.-Ex preferred his conversation with HER to the purely technical one he had with her husband. St.Ex blends the practical with the romantic. Anne was ALL romance. Charles was ALL practicality. St.-Ex had wanted to meet HER, first and foremost, not her famous flying husband.]

I sit back and translate. They compare notes, on that thrilling period in aviation which is past.

“But I never know,” St.-Ex says, laughing, “whether it is not my own youth I am regretting.”

They discuss the place of the machine in modern life. St.-Ex’s theory is that it is not directly the fault of the machine that man has become more material, but that it is due to a combination of things which have so changed his world that he is like a foreigner in it — more a foreigner than the early English transplanted to America. And it has taken them 300 years to begin to have a culture. He is optimistic that man will come out on top of the machine — use it as a tool for greater spiritual ends.

The trend toward a spiritual revival is already here, St.-Ex says, witness the return to nature, camping, etc., witness even these movements like Communism and Fascism (which he dislikes but which he regards as a symptom). And what man seeks and wants he will find — he always has.

C. is less hopeful, or rather, more practical, taking a nearer view of it and the suffering involved, and what road to choose.

And all this from French into English and vice versa, my mind panting in the traces.