what a residency is actually for
this is all an Ennet House residency is supposed to do: buy these poor yutzes some time, some thin pie-slice of abstinent time, till they can start to get a whiff of what’s true and deep, almost magic, under the shallow surface of what they’re trying to do.
Context
The institution's modest, exact self-understanding: Ennet House does not cure or convert, it "buy[s]... some thin pie-slice of abstinent time" — a holding action that keeps a person alive and dry long enough for the program's banalities to stop seeming banal. The whole theory of the House as a machine is in that lowered ambition: not transformation, just enough purchased time for a "whiff of what’s true and deep" to arrive on its own schedule. (The cliché-that-deepens depth-model itself — "drops off and deepens like the lobster-waters off the North Shore" — is the irony-sincerity register war's, landed there; taken here only as the residency's function.)