the aloneness that is all they have in common — "how can we keep from being…" · S1

Hal states the book's master problem to a floor of ten-year-olds: in an individual sport the meaning of "individual" is that everyone is deeply, structurally alone, and the only thing the aloneness is shared is that it is universal. The paradox he cannot dissolve, how a hundred and thirty-six people can eat and shower and train together and remain that many sealed interiors jammed into one hill, is the whole novel in a Viewing Room, and one of the little kids supplies the word for it: Solipsism.