Hal at the Inner-Infant meeting (p. 801)

quote

Hal figures the tears and bears have something to do with giving up drugs, and that the Meeting is probably on the verge of coming around to talking explicitly about drugs and how to give up drugs for a certain period without feeling indescribably wretched and bereft, or maybe at least some data on how long one might expect the wretchedness of giving up drugs to continue before the old nervous system and salivary glands returned to normal. […] Hal wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge.

Context

What Hal wants from recovery is data — a timetable for when the wretchedness ends — and the last clause gives the anhedonic's exact predicament: he can't feel hope, so he hopes for a hopeful feeling, at one remove. The same double distance as "appalled me itself appalled me" (p. 898).

Quoted from

Scene 160: hal inner infant meeting

In anthology

Depression and Anhedoniasupporting