the ultimate compliment: a hall that forgets to blink
The host White Flaggers pay this burnt public husk of a newcomer the ultimate Boston AA compliment: they have to consciously try to remember even to blink as they watch her, listening. I.D.ing without effort.
Context
The theme's model of perfect Identification, and its quiet moral floor. Total reception — a room that forgets to blink, Ewell and Gompert included, "looking not just at the speaker's face but into it" — is the reward for a truth told with no defenses left. And it comes with no judgment, because the recognition is that "it was basically the same all over, after all, Out There": her ruin differs from theirs only in degree. The closing note names the whole theme's stance toward its sufferers — not culpability but a "tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for," the Disease as something befallen, borne, and survived in common.