What an obsession is identity! We search for it, because the private sensation when we are in our own identity is that we feel sincere as we speak, we feel real, and this little phenomenon of good feeling conceals an existential mystery as important to psychology as the cogito ergo sum—it is nothing less than that the emotional condition of feeling real is, for whatever reason, so far superior to the feeling of a void in oneself that it can become for protagonists like Marilyn a motivation more powerful than the instinct of sex, or the hunger for position or money. Some will give up love or
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