Privacy is complicated. We're a mystery not just to others but to our ourselves | Giles Fraser

We find out so little about a person by watching them on Big Brother or reading their secrets exposed in the Daily MailWe just met half an hour ago. But I'm sitting in a Soho tapas bar, drinking sherry, and telling Josh Cohen my life story. The joke – lost on neither of us – is that he has just published a book called The Private Life, questioning our confessional culture and the need some people have to over-share. I suspect I am doing it on purpose. Maybe trying to flush out whether his critique of openness is just a cover for some sort of squeamishness about personal details. It's not. Or maybe I am trying to figure out how a psychoanalyst can have the chutzpah to write a book defending privacy when he spends hour after hour peering into the inner lives of his clients.He tells me about the Reverend Hooper in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1836 short story The Minister's Black Veil. One day, quite without explanation, the minister starts to wear a crepe veil over his face. His congregation are understandably disturbed. No one knows the reason why he is doing it. Only on his deathbed does he reveal the truth. Between friends, between lovers, between human beings and God: "I look around me and lo! On every visage, a Black Veil!" In other words, his material veil is just a physical expression of the veil that exists on every human face. The face is both the point of access to another's subjectivity and the means of its concealment. How very confusing.As he speaks, I am reminded of... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2014-02-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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