the Big Buddy sessions: limits and rituals
He's thinking in an abstract absent way about limits and rituals, listening to Blott give Beak his aperçu. Like as in is there a clear line, a quantifiable difference between need and just strong desire.
Context
The scene closes on Hal turning the day's whole pedagogy into a private abstraction: "limits and rituals," and whether there's "a quantifiable difference between need and just strong desire." It threads the anthology's limit-doctrine (026's boundaries-of-self, the plateaux) back through Hal's own compulsions, the athletic body's disciplines and the addict's cravings sharing one question about where a limit really lies. Beak's blunt "So they do it on purpose? Try to make us hate them?" is the session's whole argument compressed to a child's question.