Which was intolerable. That it should be so easy to deceive even the people who knew you best…that she should be so stupid….It was shocking to realize these things more strongly than ever before. How hidden the true self is, he thought, under the phenomenological mask. In reality they were all actors all the time, playing their video parts, and there was no chance of contact with the true selves inside others, not anymore; over the long years their parts had hardened into shells and the selves inside had atrophied, or wandered off and gotten lost. And now they were all hollow.
