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Show Moon - 78 and when this tired-looking man patiently tried to teach his language, the students talked to one another, roamed the schoolroom at will, laughed rudely. Joy wondered why they were so unkind. Were they afraid? One day the teacher told the class about the concentration camps, where-and she wondered later why he risked telling this-they made soap out of Jews. This, for once, caught their attention. They asked him to repeat "soap out of Jews" over and over, as if they couldn't understand his words. "Do you mean," they said, "soap out of jewels?" "Do you mean "soap for the Jews?" "Soap out of juice?" They shook their heads, stared at one another in confusion. The impulse to realism begun with her study of butterflies now made increasingly impossible demands on Joy. The world had become too complicated. Telephone wires, she noticed with a kind of despair, weren't always strung exactly the same way. The variety of flowers and trees was infinite. Take just one face, it never looked the same. A person couldn't possibly learn it all. She felt heavy and tired, realizing how much she'd failed to see and how many rules she'd failed to learn. She'd been leaving out important shadows, making foreheads too low, eyes too small. The fanciful sweeps of color she'd gloried in now seemed childish and self-indulgent. Grass was, in truth, merely green. Straight lines ought to be straight, angles true. Nothing she drew looked round enough to be real, square enough to be accurate. She turned to graph paper, rulers and compasses, but it wasn't fun. She grew heartily sick of this new discipline, but she kept at it doggedly, compelled, machine-like by little more than the habit of art. Finally, she entered high school, which had an art class. Her teacher praised her for her precision, and this depressed her. |