the Steeply–Poutrincourt colloquy: the fearless ephebe, and the fear that's coming
the ephebic, they do not feel the pressure, they can play with abandon, they are without fear. [...] it is soon you start to see the burning out which the place like ours is hoping to prevent.
Context
The plateaux physiology, stated as the academy's whole reason to exist. The young étoile bursts onto the tour "without fear" — the psyche isn't adult, so "they can play with abandon," immune to pressure. But that immunity is temporary; "it is soon you start to see the burning out," the Jaegers and Austins finished at sixteen and twenty, "too injured to play on by their late teenage years." E.T.A.'s job is to prepare a body for the moment fear arrives — because it always arrives, and the fearless body was never built to survive it.