Eavesdropping Read Free Page B

removed the rooftops of Madrid’s more elegant homes. Exposing the occupants, he told his young student, Don Cleofas, would reveal “the springs of their actions, and their most secret thoughts.” 6
    In the decades to follow, revelation of thought and action continued to demonstrate broad appeal, as new generations of Asmodeus, dispatched by new authors, exposed pupils to the seamier sites of London and the more fashionable addresses in New York. Reincarnations of the original “devil on crutches” handledsimilar assignments in Germany and France. It seemed that whenever anyone wanted to witness private activity, they sent for Asmodeus.
    But this expository demon was not just a plot device. Nathaniel Hawthorne confessed envy for Asmodeus, wishing that he, too, might hover invisibly around men and women, “witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from their felicity, and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself.” 7 Charles Dickens also begged “for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale.” 8

    Exhibit 1
Le Diable Boiteux

    Exhibit 2 “Coupe de maison,” image by Karl Girardet,
Magasin pittoresque
, 1847. The original caption read: “Asmodeus has borne you up above the big city… your eyes have come to rest on an elegant three-story house… Asmodeus has understood; he makes a gesture, and the walls that hid the interior from you have become transparent. Everything that happens there appears before you like so many moving pictures framed under glass.”
    The fact is that everyone wonders what other individuals do, feel, and think in private; they wonder what others are like when no one is around. The passionate spectator, Baudelaire wrote, “is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.’” 9
    The idea of unmasking our fellow humans also possesses a vaguely mysterious appeal. At one time, New Yorkers were purchasing up to a hundred telescopes a week. Most of these terrestrial astronomers, a shopkeeper told writer Bill Buford, “are not going home to count the moons around Uranus.” What they are doing, he said, is taking advantage of the “comfort distance,” the space between one’s apartment and perceptually adjacent ones. It is a distance that, if sufficient, lulls occupants into thinking they are alone and, if the optically assisted viewer is lucky, acting accordingly. Buford saw this behavior as an expression of our “insatiable humanity, an appetite for more and more about the human species, the visual equivalent of gossip.” 10 For that reason, he wrote, it is
bad manners
to close the drapes.
    As we cast our own personal gaze on the things that eavesdroppers have witnessed through the ages, we discover some long-shrouded characteristics of our socially curious species that continue to this day. Eavesdropping is a deeply biological trait, with ancient roots. Few if any species do
not
eavesdrop—even plants do it—and the chimpanzees and other primates with whom we share so much of our DNA stop eavesdropping only when they go to sleep. Their societies require that members know who is who, and who is doing what to whom. Since they cannot gossip—there is no ape “grapevine”—others cannot do the looking for them.
    When our own species was evolving, and the modern human brain was under construction, those who knew what their associates were doing, or might do in the future, were more likely to survive to reproductive age and to pass on their genes. In order to compete, they had to cooperate with a few selected allies, and this required social knowledge. These early humans, like modern apes, were good at looking and listening, and making the appropriateinferences. Twentieth-century studies of hunter-gatherers suggest that early members of the human lineage were no less interested in who does what to whom.
    But something happened. Ten to