Are You an Explorer or a Geographer?
There is an interesting lesson—among many—hidden within The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In the story, the Little Prince visits a planet inhabited solely by a geographer. The geographer gets excited, thinking that the Little Prince is an explorer:
“Oh, look! Here is an explorer!” he exclaimed to himself when he saw the little prince coming.
The little prince sat down on the table and panted a little. He had already traveled so much and so far!
“Where do you come from?” the old gentleman said to him.
“What is that big book?” said the little prince. “What are you doing?”
“I am a geographer,” the old gentleman said to him.
“What is a geographer?” asked the little prince.
“A geographer is a scholar who knows the location of all the seas, rivers, towns, mountains, and deserts.”
The Little Prince thought he had found someone who seemed to know a thing or two about something, unlike the previous people he had visited. Upon further inquiry though, the Little Prince discovers something about the geographer:
“Your planet is very beautiful,” he said. “Has it any oceans?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” said the geographer.
“Ah!” The little prince was disappointed. “Has it any mountains?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” said the geographer.
“And towns, and rivers, and deserts?”
“I couldn’t tell you that, either.”
“But you are a geographer!”
“Exactly,” the geographer said. “But I am not an explorer. I haven’t a single explorer on my planet. It is not the geographer who goes out to count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans, and the deserts. The geographer is much too important to go loafing about. He does not leave his desk. But he receives the explorers in his study. He asks them questions, and he notes down what they recall of their travels.”
Someone who spends much of their time reading is like the geographer: lacking the real-world experience that comes from being an explorer, and ignorant of what is truly going on in the world around them.1 They know about the world without truly knowing it.
Reading provides a map, but experience is the journey. Without stepping into the real world, we risk becoming like the geographer—knowledgeable yet detached from reality. True wisdom comes from action, from putting theory into practice and learning from the consequences.
The geographer example is from The Little Prince and is used metaphorically to illustrate the importance of experiential learning. In reality, geographers do fieldwork, and this is not meant to disparage them.