White Noise

by Don DeLillo

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.”

WHEN TIMES ARE BAD, people feel compelled to overeat.

I am the false character that follows the name around.

“Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.”

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

The German tongue. Fleshy, warped, spit-spraying, purplish and cruel. One eventually had to confront it.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.