addiction as the will to give oneself away — "The original sense of addiction involved…"
The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one's life, plunge in. I had researched this.
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.