Privacy is as essential as companionship
Date 11/14/2002 12:00 AM | Topic: OpinionOne of the more frustrating things about college life is not having any privacy. When I was a first-year student, I lived in a dorm across the street from my family's home. One day a friend and I stopped by to see my mother, who we discovered in the kitchen lifting fresh doughnuts out of hot fat and sifting them with sugar. Delighted, we each ate a few delectable homemade treats. After our short chat, my mother popped another dozen into a paper bag and saw us on our way.
But as we reached the other side of the street, my friend and I had simultaneous epiphanies. If we took the warm bag onto our dorm floor, we'd have to share with all those other ravenous college mouths. Chagrined, we sat down on the grass and plotted-where was a private place on campus? Then I had a brilliant thought: the prayer chapel in the dorm was rarely used. So we raced into the small, dark room, sat next to each other on the kneelers, and together gobbled down the whole bag of doughnuts. We waited a few weeks before we told anyone-for a while, at least, it was our selfish little secret which, we figured, only God knew.
When I was in graduate school in North Carolina, my dorm floor shared a phone in the hall, and the only way to get privacy-as you said your sweet nothings to a new lover or called your parents, homesick and weeping-was to pull the phone into the nearby cleaning closet and try to jam the door shut over the cord. One day when I got some pretty hard family news, I wanted to be by myself to absorb it. To my amazement, I could find nowhere to be really alone. Finally, I could only think to walk in circles on the green behind the dorm, hoping none of my friends would come to join me.
Everyone needs companionship and intimacy, but we all may need privacy just as much. And the deepest privacy you make for yourself, even in relationships with your closest confidant, is your own secret life. When you're living inside of your head, thoughts enter that space and even make their home there, but some are things you just don't say-not ever. No matter how much you tell your sibling what you think, no matter how open you are as you unburden your heart to your soul-mate into the night's darkness, no matter how long you've been together as friends or lovers: you still have some unspoken things, some little secrets in the mind's interior, locked treasure box.
Stephen Dunn's poem "A Secret Life" (Landscape at the End of the Century, W. W. Norton, 1992) is about that protected spot of interior privacy. He begins the poem by responding to his own title:
Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don't say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby
.
Okay, sometimes it would be rude to say what you think, but what about his next example, where during a really intimate moment you have your mind fixed on another-a rather self-absorbed-wish?
Or, you've just made love
and feel you'd rather have been
in a dark booth where your partner
was nodding, whispering yes, yes,
you're brilliant.
We all have times like this, says Dunn's speaker. The secret life begins to emerge from your remembered moments of childhood rejection. You build this interior world out of all the things you gradually discover others don't want to hear, especially all those just plain average, ordinary people around you:
The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
by all that's unpopular
in you, all that you know
a Baptist, say, or some other
accountant would object to.
This hidden interior world-the stuff of daydreams-eventually becomes your most precious possession, something you'd safeguard as if your life depended on it: it becomes what you'd most protect if the government said you can protect one thing, all else is ours.
Sometimes you let yourselves externalize these inner meditations by writing them down-keeping a diary or journal, maybe writing a poem-and that act of writing, or the written words themselves, feels like survival, feels like the essence of life itself, feels like truth:
When you write late at night
it's like a small fire
in a clearing, it's what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
This private revelation is so true and so intimate that it's almost too hot to handle. You think that looking at it too closely, or revealing it to someone, might harm you. But you don't want to give it up because it's crucial to your selfhood and even to your humanity:
It's why your silence is a kind of truth.
Even when you speak to your best friend,
the one who'll never betray you,
you always leave out one thing;
a secret life is that important.
Read back through Dunn's poem (all of which I've quoted), skipping over my comments. Cherish and nurture that secret life. It's important for your selfhood, and it will keep you alive.
To read poems like Dunn's that help you reflect on your interior life, as well as other poems that make you think or laugh, why not consider taking next semester's course Poems for Life (English 39; 3 credits; 5 MWF)? Talk with your advisor about it, or give me a call or an email ().
Want to know a great way to spend a Friday afternoon? Come and join us at our last scheduled Poems 4 Friday for this semester: "American Voices: Whitman and Dickinson," Friday, November 15, 4:00 p.m., Farwell Lounge. You will hear your fellow students reading some great poems by two of America's greatest poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We'll have good eats afterwards.
Email me with suggestions for further readings. And if you'd like to read for the Poems 4 Friday.
--
Carol Gilbertson
Circulation manager
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