Never real

You’ve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life – a simulated existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard

There is pretense even in the tense – the narrator is talking to himself, but talks in the second person, so we read “you” rather than “I”, which distances us from him, distances him from himself.

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