Secret

 

Thoughts, acts and emotions that are kept locked away in the individual’s heart.

We have our own personal secrets about ourselves and there are secrets that others have shared with us.

There are many questions and deliberations – which secrets should be kept and which secrets should be told and passed on.

As long as doing so doesn’t cause harm to others, keeping a secret is permissible. But the moment there is a danger or threat, you have to tell. For example, it is forbidden to conceal crimes and it is also forbidden to reveal State secrets. Each and every one of us has a secret or two that we do not reveal to anybody.

 

In the United States an unusual art book based on secrets has been published. The secrets are real ones. The book, which is entitled: Tell a Secret, describes unconventional confessions from daily life, and contains a collection of secrets that private individuals have kept for prolonged periods, until they decided to reveal them. These are real secrets that have never been told to anybody, just the way secrets should be.

 

The idea of the book was conceived by American artist Frank Warren during a major art exhibition entitled Artomatic, which took place in November 2007 in Washington DC. In advance of the exhibition, Warren prepared a few hundred postcards with a similar wording, which he distributed for free by means of stands, stores, libraries and train stations in the area. Each postcard contained the heading: Tell a Secret. Below it was a request worded as follows: “You are invited to contribute a secret artistically, for an art project.  Your secret can be the expression of regret, fear, passion, desire, confession or humiliation that you underwent in childhood. Tell all – as long as the secret is genuine and you haven’t shared it with anybody previously.” Then the person with the postcard was asked to write legibly, to be creative (using the postcard like an artist’s canvas) and mail it to Frank Warren’s home address.

 

And the rest, as they say, is history. The artist began to receive secrets from all over the United States. In the first few weeks only a few postcards arrived, but approximately one month later he had 150 secrets, most of them accompanied by original drawings and graphics. The secrets continued to pile up and, at some point, it appeared that the role of father confessor that Warren had assumed was beginning to be too much for him, just like a secret can turn into a burden for the person keeping it.

 

 

Indeed, today there is another way to tell secrets anonymously – the internet.

It is well-known that “a secret isn’t a secret if nobody knows you have it.” Indeed, many people want to share their secrets with other people who are anonymous. There is no commitment here, and revealing the secret is generally fast and convenient. In this way we avoid the shame and fear that is sometimes part and parcel of keeping a secret.

The internet bears the secret with great efficiency and telling it relieves us and makes us feel good.

Of course, this holds true as long as we haven’t revealed too much or hurt someone else.