Want to know a secret?

There is one question to which I have never received a negative answer: “Can you keep a secret?” No one — and I mean no one — has ever replied, “Nope, I’m a blabbermouth.”

I love secrets, at times have lived on them like air. Yet I now run with a crowd that believes, just like the ancients, that our secrets make us sick. You’ve got to take out the trash. And yet... Just seeing someone whisper to another fires the imagination. Trade rumors in baseball are usually more exciting than the deal that gets made. Magicians rightly refuse to explain their tricks — the explanation always disappoints. And simply reading the word “assignation” in a novel is thrill enough to keep one burning the candle until smoke gets in your eyes. One of the more spectacular enterprises involving secrets is Frank Warren’s PostSecret project. Since 2005, Mr. Warren has asked people to scribble anonymous secrets on a postcard and mail it to him to share with the world. At first he hoped for 2,500 responses. Silly man. He received many hundred times more than that.

Want to tell someone how much you hate your mother-in-law’s cooking or perhaps finally share what a relative did to you one Sunday evening after one of those suppers? Send it to Mr. Warren, c/o 13345 Copper Ridge Road, Germantown, MD, 20874.

In his work of rounding up our deepest and darkest, Mr. Warren has observed two primary types of secrets.

“The ones we keep from others,” he said, “and the ones we keep from ourselves.”

Either of which can make us sick to the point of physical ailment. The secrets we keep, the sages discovered, wind up keeping us.

The 2014 Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano is so enamored of the things we labor to hide that, he confessed, “I even try to find mystery in things that have none.”

It is my experience that the only safe place to enjoy secrets and delusion — unless your name be Quixote — is literature, the great keyhole of the centuries. Between hard covers lie hot sheets. And thus I read Modiano — most recently “In the Café of Lost Youth” — for a more sophisticated tingle than Sidney Sheldon might give.

Which brings us to the book-strewn, third-floor apartment of an 18th century building at 1639 Thames St., an allegedly haunted tavern known as Leadbetter’s since John Waters led the hippie invasion of the old seaman’s village. Recently sold, the saloon is now a whiskey bar.

Thomas Cooper had owned Leadbetter’s since the early 1980s, and this summer the native West Virginian was unloading a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff before moving last week to Florida. Tipped off by a friend that there were good titles to be found among the malignancies of O’Reilly and Coulter (Mr. Cooper, after all, is a businessman), I began dropping in on Tom to make a haul: Twain, Churchill, Gary Larson and Tim O’Brien among other giants.

Beneath a 13-star American flag, computer manuals from the Reagan administration, letters both un-mailed and unopened and boxes of vintage HO scale trains, I found 14-karat catnip: the personal journal of one of Mr. Cooper’s longforgotten acquaintances. Having been told to take whatever and as much as I wanted, I tossed it in the bag. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Its spine cracked and, like all the other books, stinking of cigarette smoke and covered with a thin film of skillet grease, I knew it was a journal of unlined paper because 40 years ago I had been given one just like it by my future in-laws. (If they only knew what went into that one.)

I threw all of that day’s haul in the back of my pick-up except for the journal, which I couldn’t wait to get alone with.

What trove of intimate avowals lay inside, just waiting for the day when someone like me would come along?

Recipes for cakes and breads and marzipan and a ground beef concoction that called for THREE CANS OF BUDWEISER BEER, a rib-sticker titled “Revenge of the Alamo.”

Some things really should be kept secret.