Behind closed doors

There were such rows of shiny booths all over Boston once, including one against the granite kiosk of the Park Street subway station. There was a brown wooden booth in the back of Pinkham's Drugs in Scituate, where I grew up, and kids lined up to call their mothers to pick them up after the movie let out. Always, you closed the door for a little privacy.

Remember privacy? It lingered into the cellphone age. I once saw a man on a train talking on his phone, cupping it with his other hand, trying to have a private call. He clearly didn't get the concept. More in the spirit of the age was a 20-ish woman who boarded a T bus a few weeks ago. She settled in between two people behind the driver, across the aisle from me, and continued a loud and animated cellphone conversation with a medical testing lab, or possibly a potential employer, about a misplaced urine test. The official on the other end seemed not to have a record of this test, but the woman was insistent, giving minute details of why, where, and when she had given the sample.

Finally, she rang off, then immediately called a friend and began to recount the previous conversation in detail: ". . .so she's like, and I'm like, and then she goes, but then I go," etc. At this, having heard more than I wanted about the errant urine sample, I moved to the rear of the bus. From there I could see her yammering away, until she stood up and got off, and went along the sidewalk, still talking.

We're increasingly worried about outside invasion of privacy, what with the FBI snooping into our library borrowing habits. We want to be reassured about the privacy of our financial information, which is why my bank recently sent me a "Notice of Your Financial Privacy Rights." But the value of ordinary personal privacy seems to have lost ground. We listen, aghast, as people talk about their urine in front of strangers. We read about the phenomenon of "sexting," young people taking nude photos of themselves and e-mailing them to friends.

Seems to me you would need a strong self-image not to fear that explicit photos of yourself would make people wince or even laugh, and you would be foolish not to expect that someone would hit the "forward" key. But maybe you wouldn't care.

I'm trying to get my mind around this. Don't people still have nightmares about being undressed in a public place? But perhaps personal privacy only has meaning if you suppose that others, and their opinions and assumptions about you, might be important.

While we shouldn't care too much about what others think, I've always admired that phrase in the Declaration of Independence: "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind," with its premise that what strangers think of us does make a difference, even if not measurably. But if not, you might as well reveal everything; you've nothing to hide from people who don't matter.

We're schooled by psychotherapy always to be open. In fiction, secrets in lives and families always lead to disaster. But secrecy and privacy are different. It's not deceit to keep some things to yourself, to hold your flapping tongue about matters the world doesn't need or want to know. Openness has its risks. Consider poor Susan Boyle, recuperating in a hospital from her few weeks with billions of eyes staring at her completely normal face and body. She might have been better off with Emily Dickinson's view: "I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us don't tell! They'd advertise you know!"

How are those four people in Estes's painting different from us in the Age of Openness? We'll never know who they were, to whom they were talking, or what they were talking about. How do we know they were not arranging assignations, larcenies, or drug deals? But I prefer to believe they were just calling their mothers, and showing a decent respect for the world outside the door.