Mario, the Bolex, and Avril on sadness (p. 767)
‘People, then, who are sad, but who can’t let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she’d so very carefully repaired after the last incident.’
Context
The symptom list for the sadness that doesn't present as sadness — a word-for-word forecast of blizzard-Hal and terminal Hal — sliding straight into drugs as the suppressed feeling's skewed outlet, which is Hal's Bob Hope exactly. Carlisle catches the slip in the "generic" example: the flowerbeds "she'd so very carefully repaired" are nobody's hypothetical. (The triple "Distant." is as written.)