Even more importantly, Hal possesses a quality that Kierkegaard would call "hiddenness" and that most intensely identifies the aesthete. In Kierkegaard's analysis, aesthetes use self-conscious thinking in order to hide from themselves. Likewise, Hal, in hiding his marijuana smoking from his friends and family, also in a sense hides it from himself. As the narrator explains, "Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger is secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high" (49).