Mario, the Bolex, and Avril on sadness (p. 768)
‘Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn’t not himself?’ […] ‘You explained it very well. It helped a lot. Except what if it’s that they’re almost like even more themselves than normal? Than they were before? If it’s not that he’s blank or dead. If he’s himself even more than before a sad thing happened. What if that happens and you still think he’s sad, inside, somewhere?’ […] ‘I don’t follow you. How can someone be too much himself?’
Context
Mario's intuition outruns every clinical category his mother has: a sadness in which the person is more himself than before — the eerily-lucid withdrawal Hal of the coming chapters, named a year in advance by the brother with no gift for abstraction. Avril, who has vocabulary for everything, can't follow him.