the halo etiology

The etiology of Hal's "halo," and the anthology's clearest single statement of nonjudgment-as-pressure. The scene's main text names the LSD-dawn afterglow "Halation"; endnote 76 traces the feeling back to childhood, to the "milky corona, like almost a halo of approved grace" the young Hal felt when he faultlessly recited memorized dictionaries "for a proudly nonchalant mother." The devastating mechanism is spelled out: he pursued this "as if Hal were trying as if his very life were in the balance to please some person or persons, even though no one had ever even hinted that his life depended on seeming gifted" — and the corona was "made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms who made it clear that his value was not contingent on winning." There it is entire. The mother's insistence that love isn't contingent on performance doesn't relieve the pressure; it becomes the pressure, generating a monomaniacal child-effort to earn a grace that has been declared already unconditional. The approval he chases is one he's been told he doesn't need, which is exactly why he can never stop chasing it. (The etiology lives in endnote 76, not the scene's main text.)