Four Experts on Secrets

On page twenty four (lines 170-172) of the Gabler edition of Ulysses,

 

You'll find the following diamond nugget of poetic prose:

"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned".

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Upon reading the Joyce quote above, my memory free associates to a Robert Frost poem I memorized from obsessively reading it so much (trying to figure out each thread of its infinitude of possible meanings) rather than from memorizing it intentionally, back in college, called, "The Secret Sits" -- terse two liner of a freight-train-impacting poem -- laden with tomes of plausible contexts and interpretations:


We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. 

First published in A Witness Tree, in 1942.




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Paul Valery once said (I forget the source), "A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others."  In other words, don't know thyself, Secreteer, it's too damn painful!


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"Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted." 

So said fellow-afflictee, Don Delillo (who's got a new book, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, coming out in November this year), and I believe him.  I know the source of this Delillo quote, but I'm not sharing it.  It's a secret.