"From the earliest years of my youth I had had the notion that every person has his own no man’s land, a domain that is his and his alone. The life everyone sees is one thing; the other belongs to the individual, and it is none of anyone else’s business. By that in no way do I mean to imply that, from an ethical standpoint, one is moral and the other one amoral, or, from that of the police, one licit and the other illicite. But man lives at intervals unchecked, in freedom and in private, alone or with someone, be it for an hour a day, an evening a week, or a day a month; he lives for that private, free life of his from one evening (or day) to the next: those hours exist in a continuum.
Those hours either complement something in his visible life or else possess some independent significance. They may be a joy or a necessity, or habit, but they are crucial to demarcating any sort of “general line”. If a man does not exercise this right of his, or if because of extenuating circumstances this right is denied him, he will one day wake up to find that he has never really found himself, and there is something depressing in that. I feel sorry for people who are alone only in the bathroom, never anywhere else.
An inquisition or a totalitarian state, incidentally, can never allow this second life, which eludes any and every control. It is no accident that they arrange people’s lives in such a way that the only solitude permitted is that of the bathroom. Barracks and prisons often lack even that.
In this no man’s land, when a man lives in freedom and private, strange things can happen: kindred souls can each other; a book can be read and understood especially keenly, music heard in some special way. In the quiet and solitude a thought might occur that changes a man’s life, ruins or saves him. Perhaps in this no man’s land people cry, or drink, or think about something no one else knows, or they examine their bare feet, or thy try to find a new place for parting on their balding head, or they leaf through a picture magazine of half-naked beauties and muscle-men – I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. In childhood and even in adolescence (and in old age as well) we don’t always feel the need for that other life. Nonetheless, it’s wrong to think of that other life, that no man’s land as a luxury, and everything else as normal. That’s not where the diving line falls. It falls along the line of absolute privacy and absolute freedom."
Extract : "the revolt", Nina Berberova- Act Sud Edition
