The dog below, a lovely little girl named Fly, is staring intently at Willie at the moment, the better to play “you move and I’ll smash into you! Won’t that be fun!” Her eyes have something of the quality of a “hard eye,” but not because she is challenging anyone, but because her stare is so intense. The look is as hard to capture in a photograph as it is to describe.

To me, those kind of photographs don’t look appealing, they look flat and strange, like some alien whose semi-human form looks chilling precisely because he is human-like, but then, isn’t. I’ve thought about this for years, and the only thing I can compare it to is one of those hyper-edited photographs, the kind you see in some magazines in which the”color saturation” and “resolution” was set on high, so that what you see doesn’t look quite real anymore. I know now, too, why it’s so hard to describe. Since then, decades later, I’ve seen it far too many times, from dogs as large as ponies and as small as squirrels. All anyone could say was “Their eyes go cold” or “You’ll know it when you see it.”Īnd I did, when Nell’s eyes turned icy and my body told me to stop reaching toward her. Everyone could tell me what is wasn’t, but not what it was. “No, it’s not about the color or the pupil dilation or constriction,” they all said (although pupils changes can be important). “What changes when an eye “goes hard” I’d ask? “What should I look for? Does the color change? The pupils constrict?” “How will I know it when I see it?” When Nell came to visit I had just finished my degree in Zoology, and had been well trained in the importance of detailed and accurate observations. “But what does a ‘hard eye’ look like?” I’d ask. “Watch out for it,” trainers and behaviorists with more experience than I had at the time had told me. And then I realized that Nell’s eyes had gone “hard,” a look that people had been telling me about, but I had never seen. I didn’t even know why at the time, it seemed to happen automatically, and too fast to consciously evaluate. As I got closer, she turned her head toward me, and… I froze. Her face was buried in the tall grass by the driveway and I could hear her snuffling at something under her nose. However, one day she didn’t respond when I called her. A sweetheart of a dog, she melted when petted and came when I called, eyes shining, radiating joy and exuberance. With its chaotic uniformity, its monstrous dimensions and the omnipresence of waste and wasted lives, the postmodern metropolis becomes the expression of the metaphysical displacement of the contemporary individual and of the feeling of being not quite at home in the world.Little Nell, a fox-faced Border Collie, came to visit the farm over twenty-five years ago, when I was just getting started as a behaviorist. ‘Anti-detective novels’ like Paul Auster’s City of Glass present bland cityscapes that are replete with signs that, as the detective comes to realize, do not lead to meaning and with surfaces that do not conceal a mystery. The detective is obsessed with presence: his investigations rely on the assumption that under the surface there is a secret waiting to be uncovered and that the urban space hiding this secret can be deciphered in a meaningful way. Among the real or fictional city dwellers experiencing the horror of an arguably soulless and demystified urban landscape, the detective takes a prominent role. The fevered hustle and bustle of the crowds promises heterogeneity, but the same crowds march to the beat of global commerce and commodity culture. Monolithic office blocks, artificial facades and giant walls of advertisement function as an impenetrable surface, which nevertheless appears to hide in fact nothing at all. Identical structures and the convoluted networks of streets confront the pedestrian with the ever-same and expose him to the risk of becoming lost in the urban maze. Contemporary cityscapes repeatedly face the charge of being soulless spaces, and the absence of characteristic features historical depthlessness and the rapid change of architectural form are among their most commonly deplored defects. It is also denied depth, i.e., the inner expansion that could harbour this essence. If an object, a person or a piece of architecture is described as ‘soulless,’ it is denied the possession of some underlying spiritual essence that would endow it with a unique and non-exchangeable identity, with character and permanence.

Soulless eyes meaning