There is probably an infinite variety of possible misbehaviours, and several flavours of both shame and pleasure that occur with them. Where there is not misbehaviour, there can still be secrecy, either by intention, or simply by keeping an experience inside one’s self. The child keeps some of his experiences inside, and perhaps returns to savour the kernel of a memory and the range of feelings and associations engendered by the memory, or possibly to touch it, to explore it in the same way that the tongue habitually explores a bump inside the mouth, teasing and worrying it until it is worn raw.
The essence of solitary exploration is that it separates us from others. To some extent, all individual experience must include some separation, especially when the experience is brought back from memory, played with, impressions and feelings extracted from it and put back again. The effect can be the creation of a kind of distance from one’s self on the one hand; or immersion in fraudulent, enticing impressions based on interpretations of an event on the other.
The sense of shared experience, however reassuring, requires the imposition of other peoples’ experience, or what we are told is their experience, onto our own. Being a face in a crowd at an important event implies that we share with the crowd an experience of that event. Experiencing the shared “meaning” of an event requires the acceptance of an external interpretation of experience being accepted as a determinant of that experience. Instead, it is possible that one stands in the crowd wondering why the predicted feeling, the shared experience, does not seem to arrive. Are we the only ones who feel this way? What is our defect?
The child who already knows all of the hiding places, also knows that the places must remain secret. A secret is a way of establishing a part of life that is only your own, that makes you a person separate from other people. It is also a way of binding yourself to others, either by sharing a secret, or by knowing the same secret as others without sharing it. All of the hiding places have been used before, by others. Each person’s knowledge of the hiding place is not communicated directly to any other. You may know that someone else knows, but not through telling or being told.
Imagining the curious, exploring, questing child, the child who collects, studies, uncovers, savours, keeps secrets, is sometimes filled with awe or dread, who reads in secret and projects himself into stories, for whom life has a dimension like that of mythology, is to also wonder if there is also an incurious child, one who disregards, is fearless in the face of ritual, for whom stories are only stories, and for whom secrets have no value in themselves, and jam tastes the same whether it is on bread or not.