Despair beneath the managed fun — the anhedonic substrate
echoes
From: Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All
- Early text: amid a crowd "radically gratified, vivid, actuated,
sponges for sensuous data, feeding on it all somehow," "It’s the first time
I’ve felt truly lonely at the Fair." [08/15/1930h, the nighttime crowds-in-the-Hollow
passage].
- IJ echo: IJ's insistence that estrangement and despair intensify precisely
amid engineered gratification — the anhedonic ground the Entertainment-culture
critique rests on (Hal's sealed desolation; the depressive substrate the
Substance/Entertainment exploits). The state-fair loneliness-amid-mass-pleasure
is the same paradox the cruise essay states outright ("on board the Nadir … I
felt despair" — asft-cruise-essay sec. 3), in a fainter, sociological key.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation