“Why did the portal feel so private, when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere?”

Near the beginning of the novel, the protagonist focuses on the tension between the portal “feeling” private in that it is usually engaged with when alone and sitting in one place and its ability to connect one to large groups of people anywhere in the world. This quote reflects the escapism that the portal offers the protagonist.

“But didn’t tyranny always feel like the hand of the way things were?”

The protagonist proposes that the portal, as a space for collective social and cultural politics, resembles political tyranny. The protagonist suggests that the impulse to fit in and conform to the accepted way of things is a kind of tyrannical social pressure augmented to fantastical degrees by the portal.

“There were only two questions at three in the morning, and they were Am I dying and Does anybody really love me.”

The protagonist describes the tendency for people to turn to the portal at lonely hours, particularly at night when unable to sleep. Secondly, the protagonist describes the lonely nature of the portal itself, and how the people using the portal are asking questions about how to relieve their loneliness. As the portal is always accessible and populated with other participants, people use it to search for ways to combat their loneliness.