The industrial migration Hollis describes is not simply a sociological fact — it is a wound with a specific texture. The father disappears into a world the son cannot see, cannot enter, cannot apprentice himself to. What remains is an absence that organizes itself, over years, into a longing that does not know its own name. The son grows up knowing that somewhere, outside the house, there is a realm his father inhabits — and that he was not taken there.

What this longing becomes is the more dangerous question. It tends to migrate, the way unmet need always does. It surfaces in the ferocity with which some men attach themselves to bosses, to coaches, to institutions, to movements — anywhere a paternal principle seems to authorize, initiate, recognize. The hunger for the tribal fathers, as Hollis frames it, is not sentimental; it is structural. A man who never received that transmission does not simply grieve its absence. He carries it forward as a question he is still trying to answer, usually in forms that cost him considerably and yield very little. The transaction keeps failing because what it is actually seeking was never available at the price being paid.