So then I chose another profession, and learned to pilot airplanes. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar.
They always need to have things explained. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of a boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.īut they answered: "Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?" And after some work with a colored pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing. I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion."
In the book it said: "Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest.
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