Secrecy and Friendship

mills:

“I am walking with Elvar D. in the Reykjavik cemetery; he stops at a grave [where] barely a year ago his friend was buried; he starts reminiscing aloud about him: his private life was marked by some secret, probably a sexual one. ‘Because secrets excite such irritated curiosity, my wife, my daughters, the people around me, all insisted I tell them about it. To such an extent that my relations with my wife have been bad ever since. I couldn’t forgive her aggressive curiosity, and she couldn’t forgive my silence, which to her was evidence of how little I trusted her.’ He smiled, and then: ‘I divulged nothing,’ he said. ‘Because I had nothing to divulge. I had forbidden myself to want to know my friend’s secrets, and I didn’t know them.’ I listened to him with fascination: since childhood I had heard it said that a friend is the person with whom you share your secrets and who even has the right, in the name of friendship, to insist on knowing them. For my Icelander, friendship is something else: it is standing guard at the door behind which your friend keeps his private life hidden; it is being the person who never opens that door; who allows no one else to open it.”

-Milan Kundera, in Testaments Betrayed.

Ooh, that gave me chills.  What an interesting concept, and one which I’ve found myself enacting without knowing it.