Soon the lady opposite me said:

"To have no legs must be a very odd feeling."

I said: "Yes."

The lady said: "I would not like to touch a man who had no legs."

I said: "I am very clean."

The lady said: "I must overcome a great erotic disgust to speak with you, not to mention looking at you."

I said: "Really…"

The lady said: "I don’t believe that you are a criminal. You might be a wise and, in your original condition, nice person. But I could not, with the best will in the world, have relations with you, because you have no legs."

I said: "One gets used to everything."

The lady said: "That a man has no legs causes a naturally sensitive woman to feel an inexplicable, profound terror. As though you had committed a disgusting sin."

I said: "But I am innocent. I lost one leg in the excitement of assuming my professorial chair for the first time, the other I lost when, sunk in thought, I found that important aesthetic law which led to basic changes in our discipline."

The lady said: "What is the name of that law?"

I said: "The law says: everything depends on the structure of the soul and the mind. If soul and mind are noble, a body must be considered beautiful, no matter how humped and misshapen it may be."

The lady ostentatiously lifted her dress and revealed, right up to the top of her thigh, sheathed sumptuously in silk, wonderful legs, that towered, like branches, from her ripe body.

At the same time the lady finally said: "You may be right, although one might as easily argue the opposite. In any case, a person with legs is totally different from one without them."

Then, striding proudly away, she left me sitting there.

Savior of the theater

Theaters should stop competing with the cinema. By doing so, they are thereby achieving –—rejoice, friends of the theater – the opposite of what they want: they are perishing.

The best way for these theaters to maintain themselves is to make concessions to the cinema; they make neither concessions in the selection of plays, nor in scope. This can be explained. What movies – giving in to the instincts of the crowd – offer can never be produced in the same dimensions and amount by theater, bound as it is by its limits. Shaking its head, the public notices the helpless effort. And runs to the movies. For what should bind the public most to the theater: art, is for the most part shamefully neglected. (As when makers of felt hats had the idea, when straw hats were worn by everyone, to bring to the market felt hats shaped and colored like straw hats.)

Before movies came along, the many second-class theaters were by far a much greater danger to the theater. Characteristically organizations of this kind are threatened most by movies. Some will remain for a while, because of the skill of their directors or through other accidents. Second-class theater undoubtedly will die out in a short time. The public, which found this sort of thing to their taste, has, in the movies, a much more luxurious substitute: death and homicide in abundance. Comedy until you burst. Juicy melodrama. And the movie actor with his heavy-handed emphases – for example, in a tragic, many-colored story of adultery (in period costumes) – surpasses the hammy Hamlet in heart-gripping effect.

Theaters that want to survive are compelled to think again about what they are doing. Directors must cultivate the pure art of theater. Actors – in contrast to "filmers", or better still "ciners" or "cinekers" – to maintain their reputations, must abandon all tricks and gimmicks. The public that goes to the theater in spite of movies is discriminating and can’t be taken in.

There cannot be too many movies. As a member of the cultural police
I would order that half a dozen be opened on every street.

The more people rush into the movies, the more a part of the fraud will become tiresome. Of the hundred thousands who throng the movies, a few hundred every year will return once more to the theater.

The number of theaters in the future will be smaller, but their average quality will be disproportionately better. The incompetent directors, dramatists, and other squabblers, who until now were parasites on the theater, will find in movie-making a place more suited to their capabilities. The many mediocre and bad actors who now help keep prices down and block the way will become wonderful cinikers. A talented shoemaker in the future will not go to theater schools but to film schools. Lispers, cripples, hunchbacks, mutes, and similar handicapped mimes will be able, more easily and more happily, to find relief in the movies.

(The cinema of boundless possibilities…)

But the theater, thanks to the movies free of hindering ballast and harmful influences, will have to return to the sacred dramatic art.