I totally agree, Nancy, and think that's quite perceptive. In my poem I see the cyber-search for an idenity as a deliberate means of suspending, delaying or holding that self in abeyance, even [and in spite of the hydra-headed games people play with masks, and using the mirror of others as masks] of denying it altogether. There's something quite pathetic [and self-defeating] about a self looking to other questing selves for self-affirmation, as though belonging to a work-in-progress will confer the completion one desires. What if that self just came round to viewing those others as mere extensions or versions of oneself en route to a common and shared oblivion, or execution, which is really how the hubristic and reclusive di Lampedusa came to see others? His anti-social front was only the mask of a man who fed voraciously on others to buttress and affirm his own narcissism. He would have loved the double-bind of the double life you mentioned. His novel, The Leopard, is rife with this kind of empowerment through misrepresentaion, except in his case it was exacerbated by an extreme sense of entitlement. He woldn't have dared to ask for admittance into a phantom cabal. He would have supposed the club existed only as an extension of his own ego, and therefore treated it with deserving contempt.