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mother to recognize him. He spent one night sleeping in her boarding house, and spent an evening observing her as a person who was presumptively not her son. It was in this sense that Benjamin Franklin watched his mother without her knowledge. She had no idea that the lad observing her was
Benjamin
.

    Exhibit 9
L’Armoire
, etching by Jean-Honorè Fragonard, 1778
    At some point in their life, most people also engage in
concealed eavesdropping
, observing from an obscure position. In childhood the tiny eavesdropper is able to peek at others from a hiding place—often under a staircase or piece of furniture—without being seen or suspected. In adulthood, the appetite is no less intense, and the means may be only slightly more sophisticated. The classic case is looking through a keyhole or listening through a wall. But one can also safely eavesdrop merely by turning out the lights and gazing out at an adjacent apartment building.
The irresistible allure of the other
    “I’ll bet you,” the film director Alfred Hitchcock said in an interview, that “nine out of ten people, if they see a woman cross the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look; no one turns away and says, ‘It’s none of my business.’ They could pull down their blinds,” said Hitchcock, “but they never do; they stand there and look out.” 38
    Even if a person
never
eavesdrops, he cannot claim to have played
no part in the process
. He would frequently have participated as
a victim
, and he may have attempted to prevent interception by whispering or pulling the shades. Kafka complained that a man named Harras, in the next apartment, “has pushed his sofa against the wall and listens; while I on the other hand must run to the telephone when it rings, take note of my customers’ requirements, reach decisions of great consequence, carry out grand exercises in persuasion, and above all, during the whole operation, give an involuntary report to Harras through the wall.”
    Harras was engaged in what might be thought of as “recreational eavesdropping,” a way to while away the hours. This was especially popular before the spread of mass media, and it is a role that the media have come to play in modern life. Thanks to reality TV shows, we can eavesdrop on people we will never encounter in real life, people whose lives will never intertwine with our own. With function out of the picture, what can explain such “couch potato” eavesdropping? Is it purely the evolved appetite at work?
    Perhaps the explanation lies in what the experience does to the spectator. After sampling the intimate experience of another, the eavesdropper may be unable simply to withdraw as though nothing had happened. “Once we eavesdrop,” wrote Ann Gaylin, “we are implicated in the story we have acquired. Once it becomes part of our repertory of stories, it also becomes part of ourselves.” 39 Everything else the eavesdropper knows and feels relocates itself in internal space. Should she do something with the newexperience? Should she talk about what she knows? What if she encounters the people she has observed socially? They don’t know what she knows, and would be shocked if they knew how she found it out. Can life go on much as it was before?
    It couldn’t for a New York journalist when she found herself on the telephone with a woman who, much to her surprise, happened to live on the same floor in the adjacent apartment building. Mischievously, the two neighbors waved to each other. “From the moment of that wave, life was different,” the journalist wrote. Over the previous decade, neither had been particularly concerned about privacy—they were two anonymous beings—but after the meeting, the other woman began to keep her shades down, and when her shades were up, the journalist wrote, “I felt awkward about looking out the window, an act that used to be innocent but now felt uncomfortably like peeping. If I did