White Noise

by Don DeLillo

“This is the new austerity,” he said. “Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel I’m not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. It’s like World War III. Everything is white. They’ll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.”

“It’s going to rain tonight.” “It’s raining now,” I said. “The radio said tonight.”

“Look at the windshield,” I said. “Is that rain or isn’t it?” “I’m only telling you what they said.” “Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.” “Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There’s no past, present or future outside our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind. Just because you don’t hear a sound doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Dogs can hear it. Other animals. And I’m sure there are sounds even dogs can’t hear. But they exist in the air, in waves. Maybe they never stop. High, high, high-pitched. Coming from somewhere.” “Is it raining,” I said, “or isn’t it?” “I wouldn’t want to have to say.” “What if someone held a gun to your head?” “Who, you?” “Someone. A man in a trenchcoat and smoky glasses. He holds a gun to your head and says, ‘Is it raining or isn’t it? All you have to do is tell the truth and I’ll put away my gun and take the next flight out of here.’ ” “What truth does he want? Does he want the truth of someone traveling at almost the speed of light in another galaxy? Does he want the truth of someone in orbit around a neutron star? Maybe if these people could see us through a telescope we might look like we were two feet two inches tall and it might be raining yesterday instead of today.” “He’s holding the...

At such moments I find I love him with an animal desperation, a need to take him under my coat and crush him to my chest, keep him there, protect him. He seems to bring a danger to him. It collects in the air, follows him from room to room.

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

“I will read,” she said. “But I don’t want you to choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. ‘I entered her.’ ‘He entered me.’ We’re not lobbies or elevators. ‘I wanted him inside me,’ as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don’t care what these people do as long as they don’t enter or get entered.”

Babette and I tell each other everything. I have told everything, such as it was at the time, to each of my wives. There is more to tell, of course, as marriages accumulate. But when I say I believe in complete disclosure I don’t mean it cheaply, as anecdotal sport or shallow revelation. It is a form of self-renewal and a gesture of custodial trust. Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another’s care and protection.

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

“Sounds like a boring life.” “I hope it lasts forever,” she said.

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

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error.

I thought that when tradition becomes too flexible, irony enters the voice.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

The truth is I don’t want to die first. Given a choice between loneliness and death, it would take me a fraction of a second to decide. But I don’t want to be alone either. Everything I say to Babette about holes and gaps is true. Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don’t let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one’s knowledge is less secure than your own.

Which was worse, the real condition or the self-created one, and did it matter?

It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.”

It is now official, according to the computer. I’ve got death inside me.

“He thinks he’s happy but it’s just a nerve cell in his brain that’s getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.”

“You’re a man, Jack. We all know about men and their insane rage. This is something men are very good at. Insane and violent jealousy. Homicidal rage.

The more things I threw away, the more I found. The house was a sepia maze of old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality.

“What is need? We all need. Where is the uniqueness in this?”