Hal horizontal in V.R.5 (p. 900)
It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. 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. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way.
Context
The novel's thesis on worship and addiction ("we are all dying to give our lives away") delivered from inside the condition that can no longer do it: to anhedonic Hal, ordinary sustained caring now looks like "a kind of black miracle," admirable and pathetic at once — and E.T.A.'s pedagogy becomes mercy-by-preemption, giving kids away before why and to what grow real beaks and claws.