the Aventura: the profoundest spiritual feelings of his sobriety — "Some of the profoundest spiritual feelings…"

Sobriety's recovered capacity for joy, located with deadpan precision in Pat's mint 1964 Ford. The theme keeps insisting recovery is mostly pain and mechanical practice, so the detail that Gately's "profoundest spiritual feelings" attach to driving a car to buy groceries is both comic and load-bearing: the anesthetized nervous system is coming back online, and it registers first as absurd, disproportionate delight in a fast car and a mundane errand. Getting well returns pleasure to small permitted things — the sober counter-image to the lever-rat's fatal one in the very next scene.