As you will see, I like benches. They are democratic, there for everyone, and when you sit on them it relates you to your fellow man, even though you may not know it. In this scene, a man sits with his hands clasped and head bowed, almost as if in prayer.  He is in his stocking feet and his shoes are on the ground in front of him--he has been through something. Meanwhile the people around him are turned away. Every person has felt like that man, enduring something while others were not too interested, and we have also been complacent, cold to someone when we should have been compassionate. I know I have. I am proud to quote here from the first class I attended with Eli Siegel as I began my study to teach Aesthetic Realism. He provided me with a basis for understanding coldness in myself while showing that it was related to the most ordinary feeling in the world. I told him about something which seemed to be a recurrent dream but was also a sensation I would have in a semi-wakeful state: I would be lying in bed and a coldness would creep over me. It would become harder and harder to breathe, and I’d desperately try to move, get free—but could not. He asked, “Is there a certain triumph in not being able to feel anything—‘I know it’s you Winifred, but I feel nothing’?” I said yes, I’d gone after this. Then he asked, “Do you think it would be a triumph to take the whole world and say: ‘I feel nothing’?” I answered “Yes!” “Do you think,” he continued, “that not feeling can be the next best thing to ecstasy? It is a solace for the injustice we think the world does to us. I would say that wasn’t a dream, Mr. Bernstein—that was a lifestyle!” I prefered to see the world, including people, as having hurt me, rather than admit I had ill-will for them in any way. But, if we don’t want to be good critics of ourselves, we have an ethical unconscious that will do the job for us. Through what Mr. Siegel was teaching me, I could now criticize that triumph with clarity, and didn’t have to punish myself for it so frighteningly.