deLint & Steeply: the half-meter gaze

Irony's habit of holding things at metaphor's distance, failing on Hal. Steeply keeps reaching for "pithy images" for Hal's serve — a violinist, a child making snow-angels, a man at a precipice — the reflexive image-making that keeps experience one comfortable remove away. And every image breaks on Hal's actual face: "pale and thoroughly unchildlike," the gaze "extending only half a meter." Hal is already past the distance the images want to impose — the half-meter gaze of someone who has stopped performing for any audience at all, which is precisely the chew-proof inside place deLint can't put into words. The one unironizable thing in the scene is the boy nobody can find a pithy image for.