The Observer, October 12, 2007
Volume XL, Issue 7
Quarked: New PostSecret book inspires compassion, kindness
Frank Warren is a man of secrets. At last count he has over 175,000 of them, sent to him on decorated postcards by anonymous strangers from all over the world. Warren began collecting these "PostSecrets" three years ago as a public art project, and today he receives a thousand postcards a week at his Germantown, Md. home. Twenty new secrets are posted every Sunday at the PostSecret website (PostSecret.com), which is the third most popular blog on the Internet.
"I choose the secrets that speak out to me," Frank told me in a phone interview earlier this week. "One secret can illuminate a greater problem we all have. They don't stay in isolation."
I can see what he means. You don't have to experience half the things detailed in the postcards to find them riveting, or to admire them as the miniature works of art some of them are. The new PostSecret book out this week, A Lifetime of Secrets, contains secrets like these: a picture of a pile of boxes with the note "she has no idea that I'm leaving" taped over it. A business card upon which is written "I can't decide if I've stayed in the same job for 10 years because of loyalty, stupidity, laziness, or fear." A cartoon stating "hey, that's pretty lame for a dream" with "my dream is to play the accordion!" written underneath it. A simple note which was written with difficulty in a childhood scrawl saying, "I loved her when I was six. She threw my most valuebull [sic] stuff out the window (I still love her.) and now I'm 10."
I asked Frank if there were any secrets that stood out in particular out of the thousands he's received. "There was one with a picture of smoke rising from the Twin Towers and the message 'everyone who knew me before 9/11 thinks I'm dead,'" he says after thinking about it a minute. "I asked the same thing from my postal once too. Her favorite was one from a post office clerk who mentioned how she used to read the postcards as she sorted them, with the question 'are you guys still doing that?'"
So why is PostSecret so popular? At first glance one might think it's because we have a morbid curiosity to peek into the lives of others, but I don't think so. There are so many postcards that I might have written myself, or where I want to find the sender and give him or her a hug, that I've lost count. PostSecret might be based in anonymity, but it's this anonymity that makes the secrets universal.
Kurt Vonnegut once said that life is no way to treat an animal. He's right: we all experience pain, we all have been hurt by someone, we have all done things we are not proud of, and we all have things we will never admit even to ourselves. But by bringing these secrets out in the open, PostSecret reminds us to show compassion toward our fellow human beings and that a little bit of kindness can go a long way. In a world of secrets, that is one piece of knowledge worth giving a visible position.
When not doing something else, Yvette Cendes is a fourth-year physics major.
