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 instruc-tion 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"...

Ronson

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