Keller @ Large: The High Value Of Privacy
BOSTON (CBS) - I realized there were a lot of things I didn't know about the late, great David Bowie.
For instance, he was a trained professional mime, an art form you don't need amplifiers for.
For all his stardom, he didn't much care for excessive fuss, declining both knighthood and another ceremonial honor from the Queen.
And he leaves behind two children and his wife of 25 years, a family life that managed to elude the headlines.
"He is English," his wife once said of him, "so he just stays quiet."
For all of his celebrity, it seems Bowie stayed quiet about a lot of things.
No one outside of his inner circle of family and friends knew he was dying, or even knew of his long illness.
And that fact drew praise from British writer Brendan O'Neill, who noted: "We have forgotten what is lost when everything becomes public: the intense world of real, un-performed emotions that is the private sphere. If everything we do is watched, then nothing we do is real — really real, un-acted, unscripted, and instead just felt, among those who know us and love us…. Bowie did something heroic. He reminded us of the sanctity of private life."
Not all people feel the same way. Some want to share their pain as a way of coping, of helping others cope, of staying connected.
But coming from David Bowie, an artist whose role-playing helped many people go public about who they really were, maybe our grotesquely noisy culture could learn something from the high value one of the world's most public men placed on privacy.
Listen to Jon's commentary:
