Big Buddy session: violas and 'E Unibus Pluram'

As Hal's genuine loneliness-thesis lands — the E.T.A. food-chain, "we're each deeply alone here," how can rivals be friends — Ingersoll deflects it twice with erudition: first this orchestral-cue joke that mocks the earnestness of the moment by pretending it needs a swelling string section, then a murmured "E Unibus Pluram," Wallace's own essay-title handed to a smart soft kid to use as evasion. Allusion is the armor. The boy meets feeling with citation, converting a sincere thesis about loneliness into an occasion to display that he is too clever to be caught feeling it — irony as the shield a "quick intelligence" wears so nothing lands on him.