Hal's panic attack and horizontal dissociation in V.R.5; the "black miracle" of caring

pivotal · 20 Nov YDAU, blizzard morning

• When: 20 Nov YDAU, blizzard morning
• What: Moving down the hall, Hal is hit by a "telescopically self-conscious panic" — a hyper-lucid, edible-seeming world (Lyle's fear-attention teaching) shadowed by "overcognitive, bad-trip-like" dread: the crushing cumulative weight of Academy routine, a lifetime's chicken fillets and excrement. He lies supine on the V.R.5 floor amid a marijuana-thinking cascade of dissociated facts (his full name Harold James Incandenza, 183.6 cm; family history; blizzard etymology). Anhedonia crystallizes into philosophy: it seems "a kind of black miracle... that people could actually care deeply," that "we are all dying to give our lives away to something" (addiction as devotion). He again registers the "nearly impossible choice" between tennis and getting high — "the distant way in which this fact appalled me itself appalled me." Finally he embraces the room's horizontality: lying down he feels "more solidly composed... impossible to knock down," dissociated from his upright "forked stalk" self.