I was too young to know how to love her.”
Because I want to talk about the grown-ups. When you tell them that you have a new friend, they never ask you any important questions. They never say to you, “What does his voice sound like? What games does he like? Does he collect butterflies?” Instead, they demand: “How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?” Only from these figures they think they learn anything about him.
The grown-ups advised me not to draw the boas from the inside or the outside, and study geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I stopped drawing. So I did not become a famous painter.
Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa which was swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing
“Straight ahead of him, nobody can go very far.”
I saw them intimately, and that did not improve my opinion of them.
disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two.
my sorrow is comforted a little[44].
