By Matt Wolfbridge
We live in an era of atrocities. The most natural reaction? Turning away. It's a gesture both widely practiced and at times widely maligned, at least on social media where "don't turn away" can be a common sentiment: we must bear witness to the horrors. Do not turn away.
This dichotomy, while certainly further exaggerated due to current technology, is not a product of the modern era. To turn away is to be human and both the gesture and the discourse around it have a centuries-long history.
Author and academic Benjamin A. Saltzman recently published Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture, an exploration of the gesture throughout the western canon. Part art history, part philosophy, all human, Turning Away makes the case that the titular gesture contains more meanings than contemporary culture grasps. The book is available for purchase on Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. However, it can be purchased direct from University of Chicago Press with a 30% off discount using the promo code UCPNEW.
Typebar Magazine interviewed Saltzman via video call to discuss the cultural history of turning away from horror, what is the "right" amount of detachment when faced with myriad horrors, and as always, typewriters.
Our conversation is below and has been lightly edited for clarity.
TYPEBAR MAGAZINE: What impressed me most about this book was the scope—it’s a cross-disciplinary analysis over several eras of history, but mostly in art history and philosophy. You’re looking at famous artwork and citing philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler. How do you even begin approaching something so nebulous as the history of a gesture?
BENJAMIN SALTZMAN: There are a lot of ways I could answer that! Partly, it has to do with how I came into this project and how it unfolded. You may have noticed that as you move from one chapter to the next, the range of materials gets ever more expansive. Although the project began with some earlier work on Adam and Eve in the Junius manuscript, that final chapter on Adam and Eve was really the last chapter I sat down to write. And by that time, I’d had so many conversations with people and gathered so much material that it was really a product of the circumstantial way I came across new examples of the gesture and incorporated them into the story I was trying to tell.
I approach things in a distinctively literary-studies manner. Still, I read a lot of history, philosophy, and art history. I draw on those fields and see myself in dialogue with them. I think that’s one of the most exciting things we can do nowadays—rather than being siloed into our own fields.
The last thing I’ll say to summarize: it’s about being in dialogue with colleagues and friends across fields. My first book had a big conceptual frame—the question of secrecy—but it was also very narrowly focused on Early Medieval studies. When I began this project and started moving beyond that field, the boundaries and walls that a field gives you came down. But then, of course, where do you stop? What don’t you include?
TBM: I’m certainly glad you included Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer because that’s actually one of my favorite pieces. When I was thumbing through the book, I thought, “Oh my God, it’s here.” I have a history degree from my undergrad and a master’s in creative writing. I took a few art history classes in undergrad, including Northern European Renaissance art, where we learned about Albrecht Dürer, and Melencolia I has always been one of my favorite pieces.
You examine Melencolia I midway through the book to help re-establish a point you bring up early on. You say that turning away is actually a gesture of great vulnerability because it highlights, as you put it, "the permeability of the self." That wasn’t a way I had ever viewed turning away. In 2026, turning away has this very charged perception, almost like you're abdicating your duty as a citizen of the world. Why do you think in contemporary times that gesture has a negative connotation—at times not unjustifiably?
SALTZMAN: Since the second half of the twentieth century, especially coming out of World War II, there has been a proliferation, an important proliferation of rhetoric that insists on the need to pay attention and the necessity of our collective attention as a guardrail against atrocity, corruption, fascism, horrors abroad and near. In many ways, that’s a very strong argument, and it’s an important reminder that we need to pay attention. There are ways our attention does hold those in power accountable.
Yet the reason it has begun to pose a bigger problem is that we are now faced with ever more horrors at our fingertips on a daily basis. It makes it very difficult to genuinely and meaningfully pay attention and then act in some productive or moral way. In the worst case, it leads to moral paralysis or a situation where one feels that merely paying attention is enough. As part of this rhetoric, we hear or see daily the command: “Don’t turn away," "don’t look away from this event," "don’t look away from that event.” The fact is, one new war turns our attention away from other wars, turns it away from acts of abuse near us or at great distances.
TBM: Right.
SALTZMAN: The point is that our attention is constantly being turned one way or another. So how do we regain some sense of agency in that gesture? When I have found myself turning away and noticed myself doing so, I’ve come to realize that can be an incredibly powerful and engaged moment—a moment where you recognize that the thing you’re turning away from is significant and meaningful and causing great difficulty and pain.
TBM: What fascinated and surprised me was that this dichotomy—or maybe it’s not even a dichotomy—of turning away versus bearing witness is not necessarily new. People have been talking about it for a while. In the modern day, of course, it’s a very common debate on social media: should you watch autoplay videos on Bluesky or TikTok or Instagram of people being dismembered, incinerated by white phosphorus, shot to death, in order to bear witness for some greater political purpose? Or should you turn away, mute certain keywords, retreat permanently into "cozy" fiction and children’s media? Where is the balance?
SALTZMAN: I think the first distinction to draw is between indifference and turning away. Thoughtfulness is a really important quality, especially in a time when it feels under attack. It’s very hard to be thoughtful when your attention is constantly directed outward. Yet there’s also an easy condemnation of being self-centered or self-absorbed. But I think the greater risk is something more like indifference or numbness. Those are two different things, but the consequence is similar, and that seems to me a very dangerous state—having a collective utterly indifferent to the world around them.
What I’ve seen in those twelve years of studying this gesture—especially in art—is that when you see this gesture, it signals that something meaningful and significant is taking place. It’s a very difficult gesture. Artists recognize this, and we might do well to recognize it as well.
TBM: When you started writing this book, did you know the question of turning away would end up being so timely and so pointed? In our current era you can pick your poison in terms of horrors to turn away from.
SALTZMAN: I wish it weren’t. I didn’t think so. As I said at the beginning, it unfolded in a very natural way. But it unfolded in a time—and I write about this a little in the preface—when I was becoming hyper-aware of the pains of this world, particularly as a new father. The real question is: how do you bring children into this world? It requires some thought, and I was having those thoughts. But I wish it weren’t so timely. I was hoping to write my next book on joy, and that’s been delayed a little.
TBM: We can all use some more of that. We were talking about this earlier: one of the ideas the book communicates is that turning away, at its best, is turning inward—not literally turning away to ignore something, but turning in toward the self. To me, that was the most interesting thing about the book. Today we tend to view turning away as deeply immoral, like “How dare you not pay attention constantly?” But turning away as a gesture has myriad meanings throughout art history. The very first example the book offers is Agamemnon covering his face from his daughter’s death. He’s not trying to ignore it; he is suffering so much he’s trying to shield himself, to go away inside himself. Another example is Melencolia I, where the figure is torn between, as you say, "depression and despair on one hand and intellectual genius, thought, and creativity on the other." How early in your research did that idea begin to germinate, and why do you think it’s so important for people in modern times to know?
SALTZMAN: In some ways, it began to germinate with the work I was doing on Adam and Eve. One reason they cover their faces is that with the Fall, their eyes are suddenly opened—they gain knowledge of good and evil. With that opening, they need a way to turn away. But it really wasn’t until I began thinking more closely about Saint Augustine’s Confessions that it crystallized. I became fascinated with Fra Angelico’s painting of Augustine’s conversion—the moment of decision, the internal torment. Along with other works, it began to crystallize that turning away is also often a mode of turning inward, and that turning inward is a way of not avoiding the world.
TBM: It can be though, right?
SALTZMAN: It can absolutely be a way of avoiding the world, but it can also be a way of grappling with the world more deeply, more attentively, and in a more engaged way. Once that clicked, it helped me make sense of the gesture in a whole range of contexts—iconography of the Crucifixion, for instance. You find figures alongside Christ sometimes turning away as a mode of spiritual disengagement or disbelief, a representation of their inability to see or understand Christ’s divinity. But other times, the same gesture is made in a mode of connection and proximity: it brings the person making it, like his own mother in grief and compassion, closer to him. And I think something like that is also taking place in the painting by Timanthes where Agamemnon covers his face.
TBM: I appreciated the book for what it said about that—that this gesture is so meaningful in so many ways. It’s not just “turn away or bear witness.” Turning away is almost instinctual. I was thinking about times I’ve turned away, like when my grandmother died. I saw my own death in that, the death of my parents, of all my relatives. I thought, “Oh shit, this is kind of bad.” An understatement, I know.
Speaking of bad things, Syracuse University recently announced it’s shuttering several humanities programs: classics, Russian, fine arts, classical civilization, modern Jewish studies, Middle Eastern studies, German, and others. About six months ago, they launched an “academic center for the creator economy”—whatever that is. Teaching people to edit TikToks or whatever. In this assault against the humanities, while the economic outlook for so many worsens, why does the history of a gesture matter? To me, it’s fascinating—a gesture everybody makes every day, a debate people are having constantly on social media. I can see the relevance immediately, but there are people for whom the question means nothing. Why does it matter? they ask.
SALTZMAN: I’ve lived a life as a humanist, so I obviously spend a lot of time thinking about the work we do and its place in society. From the time I started graduate school in 2008, during the Great Recession, there has been a crisis in the humanities. Largely that rhetoric of crisis has been tied to policies and acts of defunding that have affected public and private institutions. But in the last few years, living more with an even greater sense of crisis, I’ve realized there’s a disjuncture between that institutional crisis and the value society places on the work we do as historians, art historians, literary scholars, creative writers, and thinkers across all the other humanistic disciplines.
What made me realize that separation—that there’s a myth generated by the crisis that assumes a devaluation of the humanities writ large—was walking through the Uffizi last year. I was doing research for this project, waiting in line with my family in the offseason on a rainy, miserable day with hundreds of other people, each paying forty euros to get into the Uffizi, to walk through crowded hallways and look at great works of art. That’s just one museum among hundreds of thousands around the world that people visit to appreciate art of all kinds. Not to mention other forms of art and culture, theater, dance, film, literature. What clicked for me in that moment was that we don’t actually have a problem with the value of the humanities. On the contrary, I think a lot of people recognize how important they are and how empty our lives would be without the arts and the study of them.
To tie it back to the gesture: this book is a small contribution to understanding those works of art and understanding ourselves in relation to them. Maybe, like me, you didn’t notice or give thought to this gesture until now. But now, we get to think more deeply about it. If someone reads my book, I’d be very grateful and interested to hear what gestures they notice in the world around them—the next time they go to a museum or read a novel. Once you see it, you kind of can’t stop seeing it.
TBM: I had the same thing while reading. I started thinking, “This gesture is everywhere.”
SALTZMAN: The dynamics of it are in everything. My partner is probably getting frustrated, but we’ll be watching any movie—like Casablanca—and I want to pause it to capture the moment this gesture occurs. There’s a brilliant sequence in the new Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein where young Victor Frankenstein is in mourning over his mother’s death and covers his face, and then it transitions to a scene where his young brother is running to receive a gift and at his father’s insistence keeps his hands covering his eyes until the surprise is revealed. The gestures are superimposed against each other: as grief on the one hand, and then joyful childish play on the other. You start noticing it everywhere.
TBM: As a concluding question, we always love asking people about their personal history with typewriters, if they have one. Do you have one? Have you ever used or owned a typewriter?
SALTZMAN: My father-in-law gave me this c. 1941 Royal KMM. I started using it toward the end of graduate school, and I found it very useful—not for footnotes! But for writing introductory paragraphs or concluding paragraphs or getting my initial ideas down on the page. What I found most revelatory is the way it forces you to conceive of a whole sentence in your head before you set it down. When I’m typing on a word processor, I tend to constantly go back and revise each sentence as I write. That constant revision makes my writing clunkier, I think; even as it gets more refined, it loses the punch you get from having to conceive the sentence and then hit it down once and for all. I love it.
Benjamin A. Saltzman's Turning Away: The Poetics of An Ancient Gesture publishes on 3/31/2026. The book is available for purchase on Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, but can be purchased direct from University of Chicago Press with a 30% off discount using the promo code UCPNEW.