loneliness named as the master horror

Buried in the essay's account of why kids wear masks is its bluntest naming of the theme: the thing underneath all the ironic posing, the horror the masks are built to hide from, is simply being locked inside one's own self with no way out to anyone else. Everything else in the passage — the hip ennui, the fear of sentiment — is downstream of this one dread, which the sentence states without any of the cynicism it's diagnosing. [sweep · shared-ground irony-sincerity]