Hal goes horizontal in Viewing Room 5 — "We are all dying to give…"
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.
Context
The fact-fugue's one moment of altitude, and grammar's biggest structural credit in the book: named in the same breath as God and Satan as a thing a person can give a whole life to. This is Avril's diagnosis delivered without her name in it — the Macdonald Chair in Prescriptive Usage as just another needle. For this theme it's the line that explains why there are Militant Grammarians at all.