Concealing The Undisclosed

I thought that secrets were made to be found with time. Certainly, that’s not the case as Billy Pilgrim is unable to find an explanation to a feeling he finds within himself. I thought that secrets could only be held within three people if two of them were dead. But then, how can we know we have a secret if we don’t even know what it is? I once heard, “Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one”. We never knew of such thing as a secret until this chapter of the book. By being ignorant of that aspect of Billy, we never felt the curiosity to find out about it. Here, Billy Pilgrim reveals to us he has a secret, and therefore it’s no longer a secret. He failed hiding the fact he possessed one. “He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was a proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was” (Vonnegut 173). Even he was ignorant of such secret. By not knowing it, the secret was never a secret. Why? Because as soon as it came to existence, it was revealed that there was a secret, making it a secret no more.

Once they asked me, “Where do vanished objects go?” I never knew the answer to this question. If you know it, please tell me. The secret is, for the sake of the argument, the vanished object. When it is revealed, where does it go? I once thought about it for a long time and said, “To non existence, it stops being”. But then my answer crashed with basic reason. It cannot stop existing for the same reason that matter or energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Words just don’t appear in this text. They are feelings, which become a thought, that become an idea that becomes a letter that becomes a word, which later becomes another idea. Billy’s secret didn’t appear in the middle of page 173 of the book. It was present always, but it was non existence. In that page it started being. That song he heard ignited that doubt, which became a secret all of us know about it but none of us know what it is. By not knowing then, is it still a secret. Once again, the words came back to my mind: “Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one”.