White Noise

by Don DeLillo

No sense of the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

“It’s wasted motion. People waste tremendous amounts of motion.

The room around him was rich in codes and messages, an archaeology of childhood,

It was but wasn’t her.

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.

Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods?

He sat slouched in the camouflage jacket with Velcro closures, steeped happily in disaster.

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

Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious.

Our helplessness did not seem compatible with the idea of a man-made event.

We passed a sign for the most photographed barn in America.

The tabloid future, with its mechanism of a hopeful twist to apocalyptic events, was perhaps not so very remote from our own immediate experience.

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”

“This is the nature of modern death,” Murray said. “It has a life independent of us.

We’re seeing into the future but haven’t learned how to process the experience. So it stays hidden until the precognition comes true, until we come face to face with the event. Now we are free to remember it, to experience it as familiar material.”

Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, ‘I know this feeling. I was here before.’

But how could this be? A simple brand name, an ordinary car. How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child’s restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence?

Their bumper sticker read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL. In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups. They’ve practiced staying alive.

All the amazement that’s left in the world is microscopic.

“The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”

The airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous. Even if there hasn’t been great loss of life, don’t we deserve some attention for our suffering, our human worry, our terror? Isn’t fear news?”

I liked being with Wilder. The world was a series of fleeting gratifications. He took what he could, then immediately forgot it in the rush of a subsequent pleasure. It was this forgetfulness I envied and admired.

But the supermarket did not change, except for the better.

“That’s the point,” she said. “Every day on the news there’s another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks, arsenic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn’t the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it’s not an everyday occurrence?”

“The real issue is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day. Your radio, your TV, your microwave oven, your power lines just outside the door, your radar speed-trap on the highway. For years they told us these low doses weren’t dangerous.”

“Forget spills, fallouts, leakages. It’s the things right around you in your own house that’ll get you sooner or later.

“Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us.”

“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.”

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

In the middle of conversations she turned to gaze at snowfalls, sunsets or parked cars in a sculptured and eternal way. These contemplations began to worry me.

“Then why have you been so hard to find?” “Isn’t this what the twentieth century is all about?” “What?” “People go into hiding even when no one is looking for them.”

“What if death is nothing but sound?” “Electrical noise.” “You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.” “Uniform, white.”

“I lie in the dark looking at the clock. Always odd numbers. One thirty-seven in the morning. Three fifty-nine in the morning.” “Death is odd-numbered. That’s what the Sikh told me. The holy man in Iron City.”

“They isolated the fear-of-death part of the brain. Dylar speeds relief to that sector.”

We are the sum total of our data, I told her, just as we are the sum total of our chemical impulses.

All you rescue personnel, remember this is not a blast simulation. Your victims are overcome but not traumatized. Save your tender loving care for the nuclear fireball in June.

These snakes don’t know you find death inconceivable.

Whenever I’m upset over something, I imagine all my friends, relatives and colleagues gathered at my bier.

Imagining yourself dead is the cheapest, sleaziest, most satisfying form of childish self-pity.

“We ought to have an official Day of the Dead. Like the Mexicans.” “We do. It’s called Super Bowl Week.”

I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism. They are positive events, full of the old ‘can-do’ spirit. Each car crash is meant to be better than the last. There is a constant upgrading of tools and skills, a meeting of challenges.

We want to be artless again.

“Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

The reporter seemed at first merely apologetic. But as he continued to discuss the absence of mass graves, he grew increasingly forlorn, gesturing at the diggers, shaking his head, almost ready to plead with us for sympathy and understanding. I tried not to feel disappointed.

“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.

If I were good at it, I would do it. It happens I’m not. So instead of going into homicidal rages, I read to the blind. In other words I know my limits. I am willing to settle for less.”

Winnie was barely into her thirties but she had a sane and practiced eye for the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.

“but I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition?

You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment.