the gradual immersion, the withdrawal from life
It progressed very slowly. The gradual immersion. The withdrawal from life. I remember guys from his bowling league calling, that he’d quit. Our Mummykins found out he’d dropped out of Knights of Columbus.
Context
The addiction curve traced onto a father's harmless attachment: what began as habit becomes gradual immersion and then the withdrawal from life itself — the bowling league quit, the Knights of Columbus dropped, the social self peeled away one commitment at a time. The book uses a man's obsession with a TV show to diagram the pure form of the disease, the slow subtraction of everything that isn't the object, and the subtraction's genius is that it happens too slowly for anyone to name it while it's happening.