"I look around me and lo! On every visage, a Black Veil!"
It really is. Who do we want to hide from when we talk of privacy? Is it the others or a part of ourselves also? How much we want to reveal about our person depends on how close we are to him or her. That is a given. Revealtion to another of our inner being is an intimate act far more than any physical closeness, but how much we tell our own selves about us is far more complicated.
I am not engaging in tongue twisters here; seriously what is it that we own up as being a part of our pesonality or what acts/thoughts truly represnt us? there are myraids of shades in our characters which we deliberately keep hidden and much more that stay hidden from us for we lack the ability, the insight, the understanding of understanding ourselves!
The hullaballoo about veils, about hiding one's face from starngers, about choosing 'people' whom we will decide to disclose our outer and inner face has a lot to do with culture and our enviorment. But we may be visually out there for everyone to see and comment upon, and pass judgment and yet be completely oblivious as a human to them.
Let's take the case of famous people, be it public figures like leaders of countries, authors, celebs form the entertainment industry, even the members of the Royal families – there pictures, life-facts, what they are doing at one point in time or another are all accessible knowledge, their pictures are splashed everywhere on the net, scandals, rumors, anecdotes, mystery surround them. But the more they seem to zoom into our cirlce of perception the farther they get. We really fail to get a sense of the 'human-side' of such open personalities.
In the same sense, we can be close to another, perhaps be in a significant relationship with the person – can we claim to know all about him? I doubt this very much. Haven't we all been shocked by the behaviour of a person whom we may have claimed to know extremely well? aren't we at times bewildered at the 'sudden' change in a person leaving us perplexed as 'to what happened' or 'how could she'? In the same vein I'd like to posit a question, how much then do we know of us. Are we sure that what we think of ourselves, our way of behaving and expected responses – will we or do we always act out in that manner?
The fact remains, at least as far as I understand is that we are strangers to ourselves, out true faces are hidden form us. In simple terms we tend not to know who we are. And in seeking privacy form others we tend to lose ourselves as well, for far more is being repressed, for it is only in foil to another do we tend to discover who we are. Only in contrast to some one else our person come out in relief!
