On Keeping My Own Counsel

He asks, eventually, in a careful voice, whether I talk about him. Usually he asks it as a joke, which is how men ask the questions they actually want answered. The answer is no, and it is worth explaining why, because the reason is not the one he expects.

It is not a promise, it is a habit

A promise can be broken by anyone who decides the circumstances have changed. A habit is duller and far more reliable. I do not discuss the men who write to me because I have never been in the practice of it, and there is no evening on which that practice would suddenly become interesting to break.

What he thinks he is protecting

He imagines the risk is his name. It almost never is. What he has actually handed over is a description of what he is like when he stops managing himself, and that is a far more particular thing than a name. He is right to be careful with it. He is simply careful with the wrong half.

Why I do not find any of it remarkable

There is a kind of discretion that is really just restraint, someone biting their tongue about something they find extraordinary. That is not what this is. Very little of what men tell me strikes me as unusual, and it is difficult to gossip about something you did not find surprising in the first place.

The part that matters to him and he cannot see

Being known and not discussed is a specific experience, and most men have not had it. They have been known by people who found it useful, or discussed by people who did not know them at all. To be understood accurately by someone with no intention of doing anything with the understanding is unfamiliar enough that it takes them a while to relax into it.

He stops asking

The question disappears after a few months, not because I have reassured him but because he has stopped needing the reassurance. That is the whole of it. Discretion that has to be repeated is not yet believed, and discretion that is believed does not need saying at all.