In the film “Finding Forrester,” young wannabe writer Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown) asks his future mentor William Forrester (Sean Connery) about a novel he’d written decades earlier. When Jamal presses Forrester for details, the old writer cuts him off, “What were you going to say? I should tell you everything about me?” Jamal answers, “Well, I told you about me.”
“You could learn a little something about holding back,” Forrester replies.
Is the Private Life Becoming Extinct?
We could all learn something about holding back.Holding back, reticence, keeping a curb on one’s emotions: Call it what you will, but discretion and its cousin, privacy, seem in short supply these days. The most recent example of indiscretion came from posters on social media, most of them young women, who filmed themselves sobbing and screaming obscenities after their candidate lost her bid for the presidency.
This drama is only the tip of a mountain of revelation. From tell-all talk shows to lurid celebrity best-sellers, from our own posts on social media to the strangers on the bus who recount unsolicited details of their divorces, ours is the age of confession. It’s common knowledge that if we’re carrying around troubles, large or small, sharing them will make things better, and there are more than 198,000 therapists and 81,000 psychologists in America ready and willing to listen to us.
Meanwhile, our machines are keeping an eye on us. The books we check out at the library, our credit card purchases at the grocery store, and our visits to the doctor all leave behind an electronic trail. According to multiple sources, the government has the ability to read our emails, can request access to our meanderings on Google, and of course can follow us on social media. Between this ongoing corporate and government surveillance and our own “let it all hang out” attitudes, the safeguards of personal privacy may be disappearing.
Before chopping down all the hedges protecting our private life, however, it would be prudent to consider what we stand to lose.
The Marble Man
Following the defeat of the South in the Civil War, Confederate general James Longstreet declared himself a Republican, inflamed controversy by accepting political appointments from Northerners, and wrote his memoirs. Perhaps the greatest battlefield commander on either side during the war, the Confederate Nathan Bedford Forrest founded the Ku Klux Klan and so remains even today a figure of contention and division. Confederate legend John S. Mosby spent his post-war years in the public eye, befriending President Grant and campaigning for his successor, thereby rousing the ire of many Southerners. Like Longstreet, Mosby wrote his memoirs, which were published posthumously and did much to polish his reputation.
Unlike these comrades in arms, Robert E. Lee retreated into a more private life.
In April 1865, Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox. Four months later, he became the president of Washington College, known today as Washington and Lee. There, he counseled the young men in his charge to follow the path of honor and rectitude, to rebuild the South, and to help put an end to the sectional animosity that still existed. He also delighted in his domesticity and family life. He lavished attention on his wheelchair-bound wife, reading to her and seeing to her general care. In letters to friends and family, he sometimes shared his feelings and thoughts about the war, but in general he kept his opinions to himself. His strong moral character and his efforts to restore the Union won him praise and honor from both North and South.
One of Lee’s nicknames was the “Marble Man,” given him because of his strict control of himself and his emotions. We can be certain that he would have found unfathomable today’s penchant for sharing every passing thought and feeling.
Big Screen Stars
Many Hollywood actors are open books about their political preferences. They speak on talk shows or even at rallies for candidates they support, sometimes embarrassing themselves with clueless jabber or obscenity-laden diatribes. All Hollywood stars are prey for the press, targets for gossip and innuendo of all sorts. Some may secretly relish the attention even while complaining of it.Others, however, draw firm boundaries between their public and private lives.
Star of movies like “Speed,” “Miss Congeniality,” and “The Blind Side,” Sandra Bullock places a premium on her personal space. She particularly keeps details of her home life to herself. In 2023, for example, Hollywood and her fans were shocked when her partner, Bryan Randall, died of ALS. Like Bullock, the photographer avoided the limelight and wished his disease be kept private. Bullock cared for him in his illness and honored his request.
Keanu Reeves, who appeared in “Speed” with Bullock and has also gone on to a highly successful film career, is even more adept at maintaining a private life away from the world of movies. In a 2019 article drawn from an interview she had with Reeves, Hadley Freeman reports, “It quickly becomes clear that polite firmness is Reeves’ modus operandi when it comes to nosy questions: he will give the impression of being up for answering anything while, in fact, saying very little, or nothing at all.”
Freeman also notes that Reeves has never publicly addressed the 1999 death of his girlfriend in a car crash and the stillborn death of their baby girl two years earlier. Those emotions belong to him alone.
Guard Your Heart
To share our hopes, fears, and eccentricities with family and close friends is an act of love and trust. To share those same emotions and events with strangers, as so many do online, is an act of consumption. Some viewers on social media may take what is revealed as precious, but most are chowing down these posts as they might a fast-food meal, feeding off another’s emotions and then moving on.Like Lee, Bullock and Reeves value the private arena—the space both physical and spiritual where they can be themselves. It’s that place where we are most free; where we can remove the masks we so often put on in public. It’s the place where creature comforts are not just food, drink, and entertainment, but love and understanding and even solitude.
In “The Tension Between Private Life vs. Public Persona,” Kelly Epperson aptly writes, “I ask you to think of privacy like beauty or art. We don’t need it to survive, but we need it to be fully human.
“So treasure your private life. Put it to good purpose. Don’t abuse it. And when someone threatens it, guard it with your life. Because it is your life.”
