the one channel that carries a life across the room — "She can Identify. The truth has…" · S5

Against the book's verdict that interior pain "cannot be conveyed," this is the counter-case: a stranger stands at a podium and tells his worst night plainly enough that a veiled woman in the back row, and even the hard-faced men who refuse to sit, are pulled in against their guard. The mechanism has a name here — Identification — and it is the one transmission the novel endorses without irony: not argument, not eloquence, just an attempt at the truth that other damaged people cannot help receiving. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery irony-sincerity]