White Noise

by Don DeLillo

I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968. It was a cold bright

day with intermittent winds out of the east. When I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler’s life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success. The chancellor went on to serve as adviser to Nixon, Ford and Carter before his death on a ski lift in Austria.

“They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.”

have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said.

She said I made virtues

her flaws because it was my nature to shelter loved ones from the truth.

Murray Jay Siskind, an ex-sportswriter who asked me to have lunch with him in the dining room,

there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.” “It’s the only avant-garde we’ve got.”

I am the false character that follows the name around.

Babette had some reservations about the old gent’s appetite for the unspeakable and seamy, believing that the handicapped were morally bound to higher types of entertainment. If we couldn’t look to them for victories of the human spirit, who could we look to? They had an example to set just as she did as a reader and morale-booster.

watching the spectacular sunset. Only Heinrich stayed away, either because he distrusted wholesome communal pleasures or because he believed there was something ominous in the modern sunset.

“Short for simulated evacuation. A new state program they’re still battling over funds for.” “But this evacuation isn’t simulated. It’s real.” “We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.” “A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?”

I think I felt as I would if a doctor had held an X-ray to the light showing a star-shaped hole at the center

of one of my vital organs. Death has entered. It is inside you. You are said to be dying and yet are separate from the dying, can ponder it at your leisure, literally see on the X-ray photograph or computer screen the horrible alien logic of it all. It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself.

dead living legend John Wayne

Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I can come to God. If there is a secular

equivalent of standing in a great spired cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystical light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep.

These sleeping children were like figures in an ad for the Rosicrucians, drawing a powerful beam of light from somewhere off the page.

familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant. Toyota Celica.

Part of every child’s brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe. Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence.

She had a history of being devout in her victimhood.

We learned a lot during the night of the billowing cloud. But there is no substitute for a planned simulation. If reality intrudes in the form of a car crash or a victim

falling off a stretcher, it is important to remember that we are not here to mend broken bones or put out real fires. We are here to simulate. Interruptions can cost lives in a real emergency. If we learn to work around interruptions now, we’ll be able to work around them later when it counts. O-right.

I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet. Would it ever work, could it work for some but not others? It was the benign counterpart of the Nyodene

menace. Tumbling from the back of my tongue down into my stomach.

In the motel mirror was my full-length wife, white-bodied, full-bosomed, pink-kneed, stub-toed, wearing only peppermint legwarmers, like a sophomore leading cheers at an orgy.

Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies

for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.