two kinds of loneliness, and a face like a cow's

Hal's essay tracks the culture's hero from one isolation to another: McGarrett "riding lonely herd" as a man of action too bare of "diverting clutter" to be reached by anyone, giving way to Furillo's opposite loneliness — responsible to everyone, besieged by demands, his face gone bovine and placid under a pressure that connects him to all of it and none of it. The seventh-grader has, without naming it, mapped two failures of contact: the hero sealed by self-sufficiency and the hero sealed by overload.