And I also remember that my apparent self — this clown or hero or super — under his grease-paint is a real person with an off-stage life. The dramatic person could not tread the stage unless he concealed a real person: unless the real and unknown I existed, I would not even make mistakes about the imagined me. And in prayer this real I struggles to speak, for once, from his real being, and to address, for once, not the other actors, but — what shall I call Him? The Author, for He invented us all? The Producer, for He controls all? Or the Audience, for He watches, and will judge, the performance?

C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) English writer, literary scholar, lay theologian [Clive Staples Lewis]

Letters to Malcolm