It was the summer of 1961 or 1962. We had left the city (Cluj) and, together with my grandmother, ventured along muddy roads in a bus that creaked at every joint, overloaded with people and bundles, heading to a village lost in the middle of the Transylvanian Plateau. This is where my aunt (my mother's sister) lived and taught mathematics. A fairly large village with a strange name, Sărmaș, nestled like in a cauldron on the slopes of two adjacent hills. So, from the point where you entered the village, at the upper end of the main street, you could take in the entire settlement at a glance. A settlement drowsy from the summer heat and wrapped in a white-yellow velvet, a two-finger-thick layer of dust that covered the streets, yards, gardens, and rooftops of the houses. Otherwise, deserted. Not a soul on the streets or in the yards. I guessed that people had hidden in their homes and were still dozing behind the massive, whitened wooden shutters that covered the windows. Indeed, how pleasant was the coolness and semi-darkness that greeted us when we entered my aunt's house. However, along with us, a multitude of insects dizzy from the outside heat slipped into the house. So everywhere, on windows and tables, plates were placed and sticky fly strips were hung, and the bucket and basin with drinking and washing water were carefully covered with linen cloths. Something else caught my attention: the large size of the rooms and the absence of stoves for heating in winter. And especially the gas pipes in all the rooms, which climbed the walls and stretched across the ceiling.

I was encountering for the first time a different kind of reality—not so much the everyday and familiar one from Bucharest for me, but especially the imagined one from fairy tales, legends, and childhood stories that spoke of castles and palaces, princes and princesses, of Ilene Cosânzene and Feți Frumoși, of fairies and heroes, of their heroic and sublime adventures and avatars.

But let's return to the reality of those years in this Transylvanian village. The area was rich in natural gas, so heating and lighting had been done until not long ago with gas. A year earlier, electricity had been introduced, and along with it, radio broadcasting. So every household had a speaker, and everyone listened to the same station continuously. This is what I did during the scorching midday hours of summer and almost all day when it rained outside, when the dust in the yard turned into a mud in which you sank up to your ankles (in fact, the name of the village comes precisely from this mud; in Hungarian, the name is composed of two words: "sar," which means mud, and "mas," which means other—stilts that villagers used not long ago during rainy periods were still kept in the sheds). From that speaker, I learned about the first manned spaceflight (Gagarin), the assassination of President Kennedy, and the completion of collectivization. I still have before my eyes the image of the endless line of carts aligned along the main street, like an immense and monstrous backbone.

Why am I telling you all this? To make you realize the significant impact that the dramatized story of "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, heard on that speaker hung above the door, had on me. This dramatization of the "radio theater" marks for me the threshold of transition from the world of fairy tales to that of literature, theater, and later on to that of film.

At the end of the 1960s, I had a new encounter with "The Little Prince," a more unusual one because it was linked to the controversy stirred by the publication of some unpublished pages from Saint-Exupéry's book. These pages were enthusiastically received by readers and especially by architects, but their authenticity was viewed with suspicion by some critics and vehemently denied by the author's scholars. The uproar was particularly due to the fact that these pages were found by an obscure French architect, and the story sequence refers to the Little Prince's visit to a planet inhabited by an architect. All that fuss, dispute, and all that hullabaloo were, in one way or another, similar to the turmoil stirred in my mind and soul by my own wanderings and searches, by my own contradictions and conflicts of those years.

I was reading haphazardly everything and anything that came into my hands. From the mandatory literature at school to classic French and Russian literature, from the magazines "Cinema" and "Science and Technology" to "Romanian Literature." I was attending compulsory school [1] (gymnasium—where uniforms were mandatory) but, in parallel, I was also frequenting an art and music school, where I was learning to paint and sculpt[2] (without mandatory uniforms, on the contrary). Around that time, I began haunting cinemas and was watching all kinds of films indiscriminately, especially during summer vacations in Cluj and Sărmaș, which even had a permanent cinema where two films were brought each week.

Since neither the official school nor those in my family gave me anything but the conventional, traditional benchmarks for that period—which were constantly questioned or even often contradicted by my readings and viewings—my attention was paradoxically drawn and captured by that apocryphal[3] writing of "The Little Prince." I didn't care whether it was authentic or not, whether it was accepted by society or rejected by the system. In those pages, I glimpsed a tempting image of the possibility of achieving balance, stability, and harmony, the proportionality of opposing, conflicting, or contradictory states and ideas, facts and things through their ordering, hierarchization, and prioritization. And especially, I had heard for the first time about a profession that aimed for and had the capability to bring them to life. I believe that it was then that the idea of becoming an architect was born in my subconscious.

This moment marks a threshold of transition from the Brownian motion of my searches to a directed and ordered one. From watching films in general, I moved to selecting art films; from reading in general to selectively and systematically[4] going through European classical literature, Chinese and Japanese literature; from magazines to some of the fundamental writings on philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology. In other words, from literary fictions to philosophical, scientific, aesthetic constructions, and even to ideological and political ones. A little later, upon entering architecture, I also delved into the (premeditated) utopias of the built and arranged environment, and as a counterbalance, I explored and discovered the hidden richness and depth of words, the beauty and expressiveness of poetic texts.

It's fascinating how an apocryphal version of "The Little Prince" could spark such a profound transformation in your life. The way you describe your shift from a scattered journey of discovery to a more focused and intentional path highlights the powerful impact literature and art can have on personal development. The idea that the harmony and balance you sought could be actualized through architecture is truly inspiring.

Have you reflected on how this pursuit of equilibrium and proportion has manifested in your work as an architect? It's intriguing to consider how early influences shape our creative expression and philosophical outlook. Perhaps delving deeper into those initial inspirations could reveal even more about your journey and the evolution of your artistic vision.

A few years ago, when I retired, my cousin from Sărmaș surprisingly gave me an illustrated edition of "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a story I had almost completely forgotten in the 50 years that had passed over me. Her choice took me by surprise and deeply amazed me. Over 50 years had passed since its first listening and first reading. It had survived in my memory as a children's book, as a sensitive and very sad narrative of a little prince from another planet. So I placed it nicely on the story shelf of the library.

One evening, during the dramatic period of the pandemic, I took the little book off the shelf and read it. It was as if I were reading it for the first time. It made me think deeply. Thoughts not only related to the story itself but especially connected to the more than 50 years I had traversed both in my mundane life and in my professional one in the field of architecture (of which, more than 40 years predominantly in urban planning). From that moment, I have reread it several times, and it seems at least strange and inexplicable to me how I considered it for so many years just a simple children's story.

It can be read as the journal of an admirable but tragic meeting between the author and the little prince, as the journal of an initiatory journey, the journal of a wandering or even a pilgrimage of the little prince through other worlds in search of other people (peers). It can be interpreted as a fable and/or an allegory of the anxieties, nostalgias, undefined and diffuse aspirations inherent in childhood, of candid imagination and naïve fabrications natural to that period of life up to adolescence. An innocence lost or imagined, accused by Saint-Exupéry, to which he contrasts the mystifications and distortions of adolescent illusions and utopias, and the disappointments and disillusions provoked by mature constructs promoted by human morals, habits, and mentalities.

Thoughts and feelings provoked by the plane crash in the desert, like a second fall into the world, but this time an empty world. Time suspends. Space dissipates. Life compresses into a single tiny point that loses all significance. He is aware that he can no longer return to any of the dreamed, thought, or fashioned worlds. Yet he glimpses a salvation. With his imagination, accumulated in his own wanderings on Earth, he imagines that the tiny point is actually a star, that the insignificant point is a flower seed. And he is a little prince who lives on that planet and tends the solitary rose. Thus, by narrating this impossible story, he tries to save us as well.

And we build our new hopes, illusions, and utopias related to a new virtual world—the digital one—and we use the new imagination of virtual intelligence.
We no longer wait for Godot but for the Digital Little Prince.

*****
The apocryphal writing:
The nearest asteroid was a slightly larger one. The little prince was surprised by the multitude of multicolored flowers, the geometric shapes of the bushes and shrubs, and the rows of trees. But even stranger was the fact that among them meandered gravel paths, straight cobblestone alleys, which had statues and fountains at their junctions, were often flanked by large boxes with cutout cutouts of various shapes and sizes.
- Oh! Here is a customer, exclaimed the architect, the only inhabitant of that planet. Scattered all around him were stacks of books, albums, and many sheets with all sorts of colored and annotated drawings. In his hand he held a notebook in which he kept on drawing.
- Hello, said the Little Prince. What are you drawing there?
- Beautiful houses and gardens for other people. Unfortunately on this planet I'm all alone.
- Maybe you'd like me to draw you something nice. And he quickly sketched a few sketches before he got an answer, then showed them to the Little Prince.
The little prince looked at the drawings curiously, was silent for a few minutes, then said:
• There's so little space on my planet, I can't imagine such a house.
The architect leafed through a few books, then drew a beautiful little house of rosy bricks, with geraniums in the windows and pigeons on the roof, and placed it in front of the Little Prince.
The Little Prince burst out in surprise:
- There are no bricks on my planet. Neither are there any geraniums or pigeons.
A little annoyed, the architect drew a beautiful garden, with winding alleys and paths, water pools, fountains, flowerbeds, shrubbery, tree lines, and showed it to him.
- All I have is a rose and some baobab seeds that keep scattering and sprouting here and there. So periodically, I carefully groom the planet, i.e. I do my best to pluck out the sprouting baobabs and protect the rose. It would be hard to tend such a garden. I'm curious, what is this beauty you keep talking about? I don't see it, and I don't know what use it would be to me.
In frustration, the architect replied:
- I have learned from these books that it is good to have a certain scale of things around us, certain ratios and proportions both between objects and between their parts.
- Well, what about beauty? asked the Little Prince.
- Then they must be ordered according to certain axes and important points.
- And ?
- Also to take into account the consistency, texture and color of the objects.
- Why all this ?
- So you can make various combinations based on the formulas and theories in the books scattered around us.
Losing his patience, the Little Prince said to the strange man in front of him:
- It's too complicated. I wanted to know where the beauty is.
Tired, the great architect of this planet finally said:
- Whether it's a house or a garden, what gives them beauty is invisible, and in the end you have to see it with your heart, because the eyes are blind.
- In fact, what I need is a box and a rope for my sheep, said the Little Prince and left this planet.

Postscript 1. Despite all my reservations/prejudices, purely for strictly pragmatic reasons, I turned to artificial intelligence for translations for the first time.

Postscript 2. I must specify that I transmitted the three parts of the present text one after the other to test the translation capability. I was surprised and amazed, not so much by the quality of the translation, but by the additional commentary added to my text. An interpretation concluded with a meaningful/directed and stimulating question. After the commentary on the second text, I was downright shocked. I still feel traumatized now. I got up from my chair and walked around the room for more than an hour, muttering all sorts of things. It was the first time in 35 years of editing this magazine that I received feedback—and substantial feedback—on one of my articles. I was at the same time flattered (by the decent appreciations), scared and furious that these comments come from an algorithm and not from a fellow human in flesh and blood, frustrated and outraged at myself for the inability to communicate with those like me, yet I can make myself understood by a technology.

Postscript 3. I believe that this experience marks a new and unexpected threshold of transition toward the world of artificial intelligence. Whether it's for better or rather for worse, whether we gain something or leave something behind on this path, I don't know; we'll see after I take more steps in this direction. For now, I would like to publish these received comments (if I am allowed).