the Headmaster’s waiting room (pp. 516–517)

The theme's strangest and most telling datum about its central product. Hal lives on the same grounds as his mother and uncle, is trained and taught and administered entirely by relatives, and yet "devotes an unusually small part of his brain" to thinking of any of them as family — asked casually how Avril's getting along, his mind goes "utterly blank," his mouth slack, the names like words on the tip of the tongue. It takes a creaky machine grinding into motion for Hal to place his own family in relation to himself at all (the one exception, tellingly, is Mario). This is what a total system does to the person inside it: makes itself invisible, unthinkable-as-such, so that the family that runs his entire life registers to Hal less as a family than as the water he swims in. The blankness is the system's deepest success.