Each individual is an empire.

Men have lost respect for each other. They have become soulless bailiffs who stride into the house and scatter a family’s possessions to the four winds with no sense whatsoever that they have destroyed a kingdom… It makes me think of the anthills I used to disembowel in Paraguay; one blow of the pickax laid bare their innermost secrets. I suspect that the stalwarts who gutted this little shrine thought of it as a kind of anthill. … I have seen a young girl stripped of her gown of light. Am I to believe that reprisals are justified? … I simply cannot grasp it. I have seen housewives disemboweled, children mutilated; I have seen the old itinerant market crone sponge from her treasures the brains with which they were splattered. I have seen a janitor’s wife come out of her cellar and douse the sullied pavement with a bucket of water, and I am still unable to understand what part these humble slaughterhouse accidents play in warfare.

[ . . . ]

Here I touch the inescapable contradiction I shall never be able to resolve. For man’s greatness does not reside merely in the destiny of the species: each individual is an empire. When a mine caves in and closes over the head of a single miner, the life of the community is suspended. His comrades, their women, their children, gather in anguish at the entrance to the mine, while below them the rescue party scratch with their picks at the bowels of the earth. What are they after? Are they consciously saving one unit of society? Are they freeing a human being as one might free a horse, after computing the work he is still capable of doing? Ten other miners may be killed in the attempted rescue: what inept cost accounting! Of course, it is not a matter of saving one ant out of a colony of ants. They are rescuing a consciousness, an empire whose significance is incommensurable with anything else.

Inside the narrow skull of the miner pinned beneath the fallen timber, there lives a world. Parents, friends, a home, the hot soup of evening, songs sung on festival days, loving kindness and anger, perhaps even a social consciousness and a great universal love inhabit that skull. By what are we to measure the value of a man? His ancestor once drew a reindeer on the wall of a cave; and two hundred thousand years later that gesture still radiates. It stirs us, prolongs itself in us. Man’s gestures are an eternal spring. Though we die for it, we shall bring up that miner from his shaft.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY. A SENSE OF LIFE.