The dark-gift doctrine: talent as its own expectation, passed to the son and re-passed to the grandsons

texture · UNDATED B.S. (Jim's playing years); re-attested Apr Y.Y.

• When: the telling to Jim is UNDATED (his son's junior years, B.S. 1960s); its formula is already in the 1960 monologue; Hal records the re-transmission in an April Year-of-the-Yushityu essay-voice piece
• What: The one teaching of his that the text tracks across three generations. In his own mouth, Winter 1960: "Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. Use it or lose it, he’d say over the newspaper." — where the "he" over the newspaper is his own father (the doctrine is already an inheritance when he transmits it). In Hal's second-person essay for Mario's camera, two generations later, the same doctrine arrives attributed up the line: "Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift"; and the essay's next breath names this page's subject exactly: "Have a father whose own father lost what was there." [Attribution note: the 051 attestation is doubly mediated — Hal's stylized essay reporting Himself reporting his father — recorded as printed.]