White Noise

by Don DeLillo

How do I know I really want to go and it isn’t just some neurons firing or something?

Always odd numbers at times like this.

Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.

“Whatever relaxes you is dangerous. If you don’t know that, I might as well be talking to the wall.”

“These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith.”

I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.

“This is the nature of modern death,” Murray said. “It has a life independent of us. It is growing in prestige and dimension. It has a sweep it never had before. We study it objectively. We can predict its appearance, trace its path in the body. We can take cross-section pictures of it, tape its tremors and waves. We’ve never been so close to it, so familiar with its habits and attitudes. We know it intimately. But it continues to grow, to acquire breadth and scope, new outlets, new passages and means. The more we learn, the more it grows. Is this some law of physics? Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent. Is it a law of nature? Or some private superstition of mine? I sense that the dead are closer to us than ever. I sense that we inhabit the same air as the dead. Remember Lao Tse. ‘There is no difference between the quick and the dead. They are one channel of vitality.’ He said this six hundred years before Christ. It is true once again, perhaps more true than ever.”

WILDER SAT ON A TALL STOOL in front of the stove, watching water boil in a small enamel pot. He seemed fascinated by the process. I wondered if he’d uncovered some splendid connection between things he’d always thought of as separate. The kitchen is routinely rich in such moments, perhaps for me as much as for him.

Imagining yourself dead is the cheapest, sleaziest, most satisfying form of childish self-pity. How sad and remorseful and guilty all those people are, standing by your great bronze coffin.

like to tell myself I’m getting away with something. Let the Mormons quit smoking. They’ll die of something just as bad.

Heaven was a partly cloudy place.