Flights of Fancy

A Country Not for Children

This is a country not for children..

Yes, not for them — and there is no cause to raise the eyes in astonishment..

A few days ago I was riding in a car that nearly did away with a child playing in the road. There were three others besides me in the car, and their voices rose cursing this child's mother, and my tongue almost moved to curse her too — but I held my peace and asked myself: where, I wonder, is this child to play, if he does not play in the road?

Our houses are without gardens; our streets are not wide enough to allow for the flower-beds of a capital, as is the case in all the capitals of the world; our cars all but colonize the streets inch by inch.

And play and movement are nature in our children, and shutting them up in the houses demands an energy that not every mother or every household can muster.

Where, then, are our children to play.. tell me, where do you want them to play? If they play in the houses, the neighbors raise a clamor from below and above, from right and left — and the walls of our boxlike dwellings are thinner than the religion of infidels, as they say.

If they play on the roofs or the balconies, the danger of falling is graver than the dangers of the street.

And the street — God keep the owners of the cars — is not for those who walk.. and public gardens have no existence save in the minds of those who dream of a utopian Beirut.

Where, then, are our children to play??

Was I unjust when I said this is a country not for children??

And a World for Women...

This world is for women.. so say the owners of the motion-picture production companies. They say they take care that their films should come with an appeal to the mentality of the woman first of all, for if the woman relishes a thing she pushes her husband and her family and her friends and her neighbors toward it.

The woman, then, is responsible, without knowing it, for this cheapness that colonizes our tastes — the cheapness from which only a few films escape, films that dwindle before the films of the heroics of thieves and highwaymen and the butchers of history, and of wanton women.. Well, thanks indeed to those who presume in woman all this power of

influence!! — this power which I cursed over and over when my Parker pen was lifted from me a few days ago..

I do not know why I fancied that this pickpocket was a graduate of those films that make of the thief a colossal hero on whom the lights are trained, and whom the imagination of the small boy or the adolescent youth attends for two whole hours until, in the last moments, the police handcuffs close on the thief's hands — after he has taught the audience a great deal of the arts of thievery. And a lesson like that has enormous influence on children raised in a society whose two poles of instruction are an ignorant environment and a misleading cinema.. So I kept telling myself as I mourned my dear pen..

And along with the pen the thief robbed me of other things: he robbed me, for instance, of presuming good faith in people, so that I now walk with my eyes wider open than they need be..

And he robbed me of any thought of buying an expensive pen, seeing that the lost pen is the twentieth in my life — a life not yet long — to be lost to me by straying, or by picking of pockets, or by friends taking a fancy to it..

I shall find my consolation in lead pencils from now on.

Perhaps my reader, after reading the above, realizes that I do not consider the cinema wholly a curse..

I bow my head to it when it lets me see a film like one that is not new, though my seeing of it is new.. It is "So Big."

This film is the story of a woman who believes in the values of beauty in life, and so raises her poor orphaned son to struggle to make of himself the ideal character his mother wished..

From his childhood his mother never called him anything but "So Big" — and I believe the best translation of it is "O great one."

And the boy grew up and graduated from the university an engineer.. Then circumstances gathered upon the young man and made him swerve from the worship of beauty to the pursuit of money.. He joined an engineering concern that took up contract work by tender, with neither art nor conscience; and the mother took pity on her merchant boy, and came to withhold from him her "So Big."

And the story willed that the young man should make the acquaintance of a woman painter who did not respond to him, for she scorned the nature of the work he did..

She was an artist who could not judge people except from her own angle. And the young man began to feel the humiliation, and realized that he had disfigured his golden dream of one day being a designer of beautiful houses whose sight would delight the eye and the soul..

And he came back to himself and washed his hands of the company.. and returned to his mother and his girl, having chosen to take life from an angle other than that of the men of money..

And he earned once more his mother's call to him: "O great one"...