substance.

"I . . . love to clothe this false self . . . and I wind experiences around myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself visible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow . . . And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness . . ."

-Thomas Merton