Joelle visits Gately: Abiding — "He could do the dextral pain…"
He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. […] He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.
Context
The doctrine generalized — the novel's practical philosophy of time in one paragraph. Gately's prickly-chill realization extends Abiding from craving to pain to fear (the A.D.A. in the hat, Walpole, all of it): no instant is unendurable; what tortures is the head's recon over the wall, reporting back a glittering line of future instants you then believe. The passage 069 demanded an answer to — Poor Tony's line of flesh-taking seconds — gets one: the line only exists if you look at it.