Orin's survey: 'I miss sneering at something I love'
I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.
Context
Communal ironic spectation remembered as the family's central intimacy — the sneer as the medium of love. Orin's nostalgia, coaxed out by the fake survey, isn't for the shows but for the ritual of gathering to sneer at them together; irony was the only channel the Incandenzas had for being close, contempt the family's bonding act. "I miss sneering at something I love" is the register war's saddest single artifact: a formula in which loving and sneering aren't opposites but the same gesture, the affection only sayable through the eye-roll. And articulating it undoes him — a beat later he's "suddenly dimly stunned and sad inside," because saying it out loud exposes that the closest his family got to togetherness was collective derision. The nostalgia is real and its object is irony itself.