In the west, we are taught from a young age not to stare. Not at the woman in the metro, not at the man in the store, not even at our friends in school. It is considered rude, uncouth, and unwelcome. To stare is thought to be confrontational. The eyes are a violent medium. Which follows that, perhaps because violence in the west has become remote, we find the stare all the more disturbing. As if it were one of the only remaining vestiges from a time when we understood the primacy of meaning

instinctively, when a comment sparked a duel, or a stare could be epic. One did not write about honour but fought over it. The further one goes east, the more the eyes have managed to retain both their potential for violence and a certain decorum disarming it.

[…]

Where the tongue sees only potential, the eyes have a sense of their own limits. The eyes can never fully possess. If the tongue has the word, what can the eye call its own, except a certain intensity or urgency that cannot, by definition, last? It is this very impossibility that whets the appetite: the veiled woman has rarefied the pleasure others take from her. She belongs to no one, not her husband, not to her mother, nor her father, and perhaps not even to herself. She has bestowed upon herself an exclusivity where previously there were none.

[…]