Salty
People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.
What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people.
The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and ‘beliefs,’ is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt.
This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.
— Sadie Smith, narrator of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake
