Hal in the Headmaster's waiting room (pp. 525–526)
possibly even harder to see yourself as providing entertainment, engaging people’s attention. As a high-velocity object people can project themselves onto, forgetting their own limitations in the face of the nearly limitless potential someone as young as yourself represents.
Context
The Academy's whole enterprise reframed, to a seven-year-old, as manufacturing entertainment-objects. Tavis's intake pitch to Tina Echt drops the pretense: the point isn't athletic greatness, it's "providing entertainment, engaging people's attention," becoming "a high-velocity object people can project themselves onto." The child is being recruited not to play but to be watched — to serve as the screen onto which spectators cast their own thwarted potential, "forgetting their own limitations" by fixing on hers. It is the spectation relationship stated with unusual candor from the supply side: the performer exists to be a surface for the audience's projection, a body converted into content. JOI's Entertainment Requirement (053) said athletes are "entertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort"; Tavis says it flatter and colder to a seven-year-old — you are here to become an object people watch to escape themselves.