Public, Private, and Secret Lives

“All human beings have three lives:  public, private, and secret.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, Vol. II p. 46 (Vintage Pleiade edition)

Lately I've been reflecting on these two quotes.  Almost without exception throughout the entire 3,000-page Recherche, Proust is focused intently on dissecting the secret, interior life of the person:  that is, the third element of Marquez's construct.  Here, for example, I think that Proust's "feeling world" and his "thinking world" would both exist within what Marquez calls the "secret" life.

This helps explain Proust's immense appeal to me.  Hardly anything else I've read has sought to get directly at the deepest interiors of human existence.  The "public" life, and the "private" life, do exist for Proust, of course, just like they do for everyone.  But both of those lives are merely incidental to his secret, interior life.  In his public life, he may travel to another town to visit a friend; in his private life, he may be recovering from an illness.  But neither of these things matter to him, purely in themselves.  Generally, he's only bothering to tell us about them in order to demonstrate how these exterior conditions influence his interior, secret life in his head.  For example, he'll spend pages describing how the interior of his hotel bedroom makes him feel, while making only cursory references to why he's traveling.

And isn't that true for all of us, really?  Truth be told, we mostly care about our public and private lives because of how they impact our secret lives.  It's true whether we're being altruistic or selfish, funny or serious; whether good things or terrible things are happening to us or around us.