I feel sorry for people who are alone only in the bathroom, never anywhere else.
An inquisition or totalitarian state, incidentally, can never allow this second life, which eludes any and every control. It is no accident that they arrange people's lives in such a way that the only solitude permitted is that of the bathroom. Barracks and prisons often lack even that.
In this no man's land, when a man lives in freedom and private, strange things can happen: kindred souls can find each other; a book can be read and understood especially keenly, music heard in some special way. In the quiet and solitude a thought might occur that changes a man's life, ruins or saves him. Perhaps in this no man's land people cry, or drink, or think about something no one else knows, or they examine their bare feet, or they try to find a new place for a parting on their balding head, or they leaf through a picture magazine of half-naked beauties and muscle-men -- I don't know, and I don't want to know. In childhood and even in adolescence (an in old age as well) we don't always feel the need for that other life. Nonetheless, it's wrong to think of that other life, that no man's land, as a luxury, and everything else as normal. That's not where the dividing line falls. It falls along the line of absolute privacy and absolute freedom.