reception so total the room forgets to blink · S5
so good that even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker’s face but into it
Context
The theme's positive pole, the thing all the failure-catalogs are measured against: a message so unfortified that it is received completely, a whole room's attention gone so total that blinking has to be remembered on purpose. And the highest form of it is not looking at a face but looking into it — reception that reaches past the surface the rest of the book keeps bouncing off. Even the hall's hardest cynics are, for the length of her testimony, unalone with her. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery irony-sincerity]