Benjamin Saltzman

And he undergoes this struggle within himself.

He notices them first and then he sort of backs away and turns away and then he

covers his eyes and struggles.

And then he eventually gives in and looks and then yells at himself and condemns himself.

He says to his own eyes, take your fill of that beautiful sight.

And it's doing a particular thing at this moment in the Republic.

But one of the takeaways, I think, is that this struggle about whether or not to one should look is real.

It

reflects a kind of broken a breaking of the self it's a it's a sort of struggle within the self um and um and yeah so that it it signals that there's something important going on there the other thing that's happening is is like a tension between the impulse and the performance um which might also kind of get at some of the questions you're asking right like do

Is he, are we turning away in that moment, covering our eyes because we are like impulsively not wanting to look or are we doing it to perform for others around us because we think we shouldn't look?

Yeah.

I mean, I think we've all probably done it, safe to say.

And it means a lot when we do.

And I think we often think about why we did it.

It stays with us for a while.

And so, that's what I'm interested in.

What does this gesture mean?

And what does it mean across the ages in art, when it shows up in art and poetry and philosophy?

Well, I mean, one of the things that we face now more than ever, right, is like the frequency and the speed with which we encounter the suffering of others, you know, on our phones, in the street.

um in the media the news and i guess one way to think about it is that our attention is constantly being turned from one uh one act of violence one instance of suffering to another um and so the question is where you know where is our agency in in that um where does our decision making lie and how how do how do we kind of dwell with that decision when we do turn away from from someone