the father's feeling, received only as technique
and can't summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might have been feeling as he patiently labored. Maybe that was the point of the thing's metasilliness, to have nothing really felt going on.
Context
Watching one of his father's cartridges, Hal tries to picture the man bent over the editing rig and finds the interior simply blank to him — no access at all to what Himself might have felt while making the thing. So he reaches for the reading that closes the question instead of leaving it open: maybe there was nothing to feel, maybe the point was to have nothing going on. The father who spoke mainly through films left a son who can parse the technique flawlessly and cannot receive the feeling the technique was carrying. [sweep · shared-ground film-optics fathers-sons]