addiction as the will to give oneself away
We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.
Context
Hal excavates the word and finds his own condition inside it: addiction as addictus, bound over and dedicated, the same self-donation whether the master is a religion or a needle. The devastating move is "To games or needles" set side by side — his tennis and his dope named as the same act of plunging-in, a flight-from disguised as a devotion — and the tell that he "researched this," went and looked up the etymology of the thing that has him, which is the addict's helpless scholarship of his own cage.