Privacy vs Solitude

NPR ran a discussion of what privacy means in the 21st century Face Book world.
An author of a book about privacy made some thoughtful comments to the effect that wanting privacy is not the same thing as wanting to be a hermit.  He wanted privacy, he said, but he craved human contact and friendships.

He mentioned how displeased he'd been when a friend shared letters he had written with other friends. Those letters were intended for the eyes of only the friend to whom he'd mailed them, not for others.  He felt his privacy had been betrayed.

I would have thought he had been betrayed, even though the letters contained nothing particularly embarrassing, but you always have to make judgments about how much of a conversation you will share with others.  So the friend who showed the letters around betrayed a trust, but I'm not sure privacy was the issue.

If you meet a woman after work, bring her home for the night and your neighbor starts ringing your doorbell, inviting himself in, he is violating privacy. If he sees her leaving in the morning and mentions it to others, I'm not sure that's violating privacy, so much as being a gossip, but once you leave your own private space, anything is fair game.

When I was in college, I lived with a roommate, who often had people in our room, sitting on my bed, at my desk, fiddling with  photographs on my desk of people from home, looking in my closet to see what kind of clothes were hanging there. That violated my privacy, but it didn't bother me much, for reasons which will become clear.

My roommate spent most of his day in our room. I arose at 7 AM and was out the door and not back until 10 PM most nights, when I went to bed. I wasn't much of a roommate, if you were looking for companionship or a human connection.

I spent most of my day in the library, leaving only for meals or for class, or for a laboratory.  I studied at a carrell in the library, which was a desk next to a window and an air duct which made white noise. I could look out at the gates to the university and I could see students wandering about.

I looked forward to class, because it was the only time of day I actually spoke to anyone. I enjoyed the give and take in class, and often chatted with classmates on my way back to the library, but I did not stop off at the Ivy Room for coffee, and I did not ask much about them nor did they ask much about me.  I ate dinner alone in the cafeteria, timing my arrival for times when the line would be shortest. 

Classmates, who were in my classes sometimes drifted by my library carrell/cave and they kept their comments brief, not wanting to disturb my privacy.

I noticed, early on in freshman year, that many of the students who lived in my dorm were positively terrified of being alone. They would study together in their dorm rooms, with radios or stereos on. They went to meals in groups, hung out on the dorm porches or in the TV room. When they did go to the library, they studied in the open "reading rooms" where large tables accommodate six students and a glass partition separated a "lounge."  
My roommate would spend hours in the lounge, with his books on his lap, talking about French philosophers, slipping in and out of French, Italian and whatever language he had picked up that week. He could do fifteen different types of Rhode Island accents, and when he did them, you could hear the difference between Cranston, South County , the East Side and the West End.  He told everybody about all the girls he was interested in and about all his troubles. 
Privacy was not his top concern.

He told the rest of the dorm he lived with a guy he rarely actually saw. One of the wild boys in the dorm, a sort of real life John Belushi a la  Animal House, a guy who loved to roll bowling balls down the stairwells because each stairwell had a dorm room off it and the sound was thunderous inside those stairwell rooms. He also liked urinating down the stairwells on Saturday night after drinking a lot of beer. 

He was, I am told, terrified of me. I was, in his words, "The Phantom."  He had looked through my things, convinced himself I was an actual real human being, but a person who did not need other people, who actually was indifferent about human contact.

He was perplexed by my clothes. I had lots of good clothes, but usually wore only  a few different pairs of jeans or corduroy pants and shirts.  From my personal effects, he  deduced I liked girls, had know some attractive girls in my home town, but did not seem to need girls in college.

But, beyond his inspection of my artifacts in my room, he never violated my privacy. He said nothing when we passed in the stairwell. I usually just looked at him, in the eyes and said nothing. What I saw in his eyes was usually stone cold terror.

He knew I did my laundry in the basement of the dorm on Saturday nights when the rest of dorm was at the weekly party in the party room. It was the one time of week I knew there would be no competition for the washers and driers.  After the library closed Saturday night, was the one time I stayed in my room.  My roommate and everyone else was three floors away at the party. It was a good time to write letters to friends at other colleges and some who were still back home.

I was not at college to make friends or to meet girls. I was there to earn my academic merit badges and to get past it. I did not like many of the students I met and I intensely disliked some of the professors. 

But there were some professors, about half of them actually, who were not just likable but inspirational.  

After three years,  senior year was more normal. I moved out of the dorm, into a new dorm opened for graduate students, which had some space for undergraduates. I got a girlfriend and even went to a few parties. I hung out a little on the College Green, and met some interesting people. People knew more about me, but only what I wanted them to know. My girlfriend knew better than to advertise my life. That was a part of the trust between us. She had to tell her best friend where she was staying at night so they didn't start dragging the river for her body, but generally, we kept our relationship, "private." 

I liked that privacy. Our time together was between the two of us. There was no Facebook, no Internet but there was lots of gossip, lots of interest in who was dating whom.  I didn't need that.  Many girls seemed to need to know who was "with" who. It was sort of a competition. I did not want one of those girls. If being with me was about gaining social status, find someone else. Fortunately, I found a girl who respected privacy.

The only place I've ever had as much privacy since was in New York City, where there were so many people living so close together, they had perfected the art of privacy.