5 September 2013
“Man is least himself”, Oscar Wilde wrote 125 years ago, “when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” But what if the truth that the mask helps us realise is that there is nothing beneath our masks but more masks, until we reach that most terrifying mask of all? “Masks beneath masks”, as Salmon Rushdie eerily imagined in his novel The Satanic Verses, “until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”