Random Quandary
Apr. 16th, 2003 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksSo I was walking along on my way to Greek, enjoying the nice spring weather and the blowing pink-and-white sakura and the fact that I am feeling enough better that I don't have to wear sixteen layers of clothing even though I still sound like a frog, and I dropped the book I am reading on the sidewalk. The book is a cultural history of nihilism and negationism, Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus, which I have read several times before. It discusses many of the atrocities of the twentieth century as it explains the forces that drove many citizens into nihilist art and politics. The book bounced open as it fell, and landed, face-up, displaying a picture taken during the liberation of Belsen. I was running late, so I scooped it up and went on my way. But it has been bothering me ever since: here is this image, of death and horror and the lowest depths of the human spirit, which, when seen in context in the book, produces a reaction of pain/fear/pity/determination that this not happen again and all the other things that come when one contemplates a picture from the Holocaust. The use of the picture is fully justified in the book.
But what reaction occurs when one only sees this sort of image in passing? The book bounced open; I was late; I shut the book as if it were any image. If I had seen it in a window on the street, and not stopped, what emotional effect would it have on me? What emotional effect would it not have on me? Does seeing these images quickly in passing desensitize one, or is one's usual emotional reaction to this sort of thing actually a considered reaction, in which one has to allow the implications of the image to penetrate and think about them in order to be emotionally affected? What would it mean if the latter were true?
I felt obscurely guilty that the picture didn't bother me in this context, as I scooped the book up again. Where does that guilt come from? Would other people share it? Are we taught that we have to feel guilty if we do not take the time to feel pain on seeing even an image of others suffering, fifty years ago?
How would an occurrence like this affect the rest of you? Would it make you stop to consider the picture? Would you feel a sense of guilt if you didn't?
But what reaction occurs when one only sees this sort of image in passing? The book bounced open; I was late; I shut the book as if it were any image. If I had seen it in a window on the street, and not stopped, what emotional effect would it have on me? What emotional effect would it not have on me? Does seeing these images quickly in passing desensitize one, or is one's usual emotional reaction to this sort of thing actually a considered reaction, in which one has to allow the implications of the image to penetrate and think about them in order to be emotionally affected? What would it mean if the latter were true?
I felt obscurely guilty that the picture didn't bother me in this context, as I scooped the book up again. Where does that guilt come from? Would other people share it? Are we taught that we have to feel guilty if we do not take the time to feel pain on seeing even an image of others suffering, fifty years ago?
How would an occurrence like this affect the rest of you? Would it make you stop to consider the picture? Would you feel a sense of guilt if you didn't?
