"White Noise"

This novel started promisingly enough, (so rare to encounter a professor protagonist not mired in angst) and even later there were flashes of brilliance, but random plotting led us into the weeds, and Don DeLillo ended up writing another midlife crisis novel.

• I've witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sundazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people's names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage.
• Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness. Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.
• He is known as Old Man Treadwell, as if he were a landmark, a rock formation or brooding swamp.
• The point is that Babette, whatever she is doing, makes me feel sweetly rewarded, bound up with a full-souled woman, a lover of daylight and dense life, the miscellaneous swarming air of families. I watch her all the time doing things in measured sequence, skillfully, with seeming ease, unlike my former wives, who had a tendency to feel estranged from the objective world— a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the intelligence community.
• 'They genuinely believe they're entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.'
  'I have trouble imagining death at that income level,' she said.
  'Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.'
• Decorative gestures add romance to a life. Idling students may see time itself as a complex embellishment, a romance of human consciousness, as they witness the chairman walking across campus, crook'd arm emerging from his medieval robe, the digital watch blinking in late summer dusk.
• The teaching staff is composed almost solely of New York émigrés, smart, thuggish, movie-mad, trivia-crazed. They are here to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they'd known in their Europeshadowed childhoods—an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles.
• '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 seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.
• Ranks of thousands of flagbearers arrayed before columns of frozen light, a hundred and thirty antiaircraft searchlights aimed straight up—a scene that resembled a geometric longing, the formal notation of some powerful mass desire. There was no narrative voice. Only chants, songs, arias, speeches, cries, cheers, accusations, shrieks.
• (German:) Sounds came spewing from the base of his tongue, harsh noises damp with passion. He was only demonstrating certain basic pronunciation patterns but the transformation in his face and voice made me think he was making a passage between levels of being.
• I could see it in her eyes, a sardonic connection. It was these secondary levels of life, these extrasensory flashes and floating nuances of being, these pockets of rapport forming unexpectedly, that made me believe we were a magic act, adults and children together, sharing unaccountable things.
• (Supermarket:) 'Tibetans believe there is a transitional state between death and rebirth. Death is a waiting period, basically. Soon a fresh womb will receive the soul. In the meantime the soul restores to itself some of the divinity lost at birth.'... 'That's what I think of whenever I come in here. This place recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it's a gateway or pathway. Look how bright. It's full of psychic data.'
• In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name, you know a street name, a dog's name. 'He drove an orange Mazda.' You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification and cosmic placement
• (Students in the library:) The positions are so studied they amount to a classical mime. There is an element of overrefinement and inbreeding. Sometimes I feel I've wandered into a Far Eastern dream, too remote to be interpreted. But it is only the language of economic class they are speaking, in one of its allowable outward forms, like the convocation of station wagons at the start of the year.
• This is the society of kids. I tell my students they're already too old to Figure importantly in the making of society. Minute by minute they're beginning to diverge from each other. 'Even as we sit here,' I tell them, 'you are spinning out from the core, becoming less recognizable as a group, less targetable by advertisers and mass-producers of culture. Kids are a true universal. But you're well beyond that, already beginning to drift, to feel estranged from the products you consume. Who are they designed for? What is your place in the marketing scheme? Once you're out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.'
• He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it. Alfonse himself was occasionally entertaining in a pulverizing way. He had a manner that enabled him to absorb and destroy all opinions in conflict with his. When he talked about popular culture, he exercised the closed logic of a religious zealot, one who kills for his beliefs.
• I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit. I felt expansive, inclined to be sweepíngly generous,
• Certain elements in the crew had decided to pretend that it was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn't this suggest that the two forms of flight termination were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter? An encouraging question under the circumstances, if you didn't think about it too long, and there was no time to think right now. The basic difference between a crash and a crash landing seemed to be that you could sensibly prepare for a crash landing,
• Bee was small-featured except for her eyes, which seemed to contain two forms of life, the subject matter and its hidden implications. She talked about Babette's effortless skills in making things work, the house, the kids, the flow of the routine universe, sounding a little like me, but there was a secondary sea-life moving deep in the iris of her eye. What did it mean, what was she really saying, why did she seem to expect me to respond in kind? She wanted to communicate in this secondary way, with optic fluids.
• 'They're calling it the black billowing cloud.' 'Good.'
  'Why is that good?'
  'It means they're looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They're on top of the situation.'
• The men in Mylex suits moved with a lunar caution. Each step was the exercise of some anxiety not provided for by instinct. Fire and explosion were not the inherent dangers here. This death would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies not yet born. They moved as if across a swale of moon dust, bulky and wobbling, trapped in the idea of the nature of time.
• I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.'
• It made us feel like fools, like tourists doing all the wrong things. Why were they content to shop for furniture while we sat panicky in slowpoke traffic in a snowstorm? They knew something we didn't. In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one's knowledge is less secure than your own.
• Steffie had learned about déjà vu on the radio but then missed the subsequent upgrading to more deadly conditions, it could mean she was in a position to be tricked by her own apparatus of suggestibility. She and Denise had been lagging all evening. They were late with sweaty palms, late with nausea, late again with déjà vu. What did it all mean? Did Steffie truly imagine she'd seen the wreck before or did she only imagine she'd imagined it? Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion? Is there a true déjà vu and a false déjà vu?
• But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event, like the vivid scene in the switching yard or the people trudging across the snowy overpass with children, food, belongings, a tragic army of the dispossessed. Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious. It is surely possible to be awed by the thing that threatens your life, to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself, more powerful, created by elemental and willful rhythms.
• Near the main buildings we saw a group of men and women carrying clipboards and walkie-talkies, non-Mylex-suited officials, experts in the new science of evacuation.
• I didn't want him to see me there. It would make him self-conscious, remind him of his former life as a gloomy and fugitive boy. Let him bloom, if that's what he was doing, in the name of mischance, dread and random disaster.
• Your genetics, your personals, your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-hospitals. It comes back pulsing stars. This doesn't mean anything is going to happen to you as such, at least not today or tomorrow. It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.'
• It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.
• She uttered two clearly audible words, 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.
  A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. 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?
• 'The very idea, the very existence, the wondrous ingenuity. On the one hand I definitely admire it. Just to think there are people out there who can conjure such things. A cloud-eating microbe or whatever. There is just no end of surprise. All the amazement that's left in the world is microscopic. But I can live with that. What scares me is have they thought it through completely?'
• Snow watch, said the forecasters. Snow alert. Snowplows. Snow mixed with sleet and freezing rain. It was already snowing in the west. It was already moving to the east. They gripped this news like a pygmy skull. Snow showers. Snow flurries. Snow warnings. Driving snow. Blowing snow. Deep and drifting snow. Accumulations, devastations. The old people shopped in a panic.
• Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it.
• I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
• Five minutes, victims. 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. We're at four minutes and counting. Victims, go limp. And remember you're not here to scream or thrash about. We like a low-profile victim. This isn't New York or L.A.
• I always feel good when I'm with Wilder. Is it because pleasures don't cling to him? He is selfish without being grasping, selfish in a totally unbounded and natural way. There's something wonderful about the way he drops one thing, grabs for another. I get annoyed when the other kids don't fully appreciate special moments or occasions. They let things slide away that should be kept and savored. But when Wilder does it, I see the spirit of genius at work.'
• It was the benign counterpart of the Nyodene menace. Tumbling from the back of my tongue down into my stomach. The drug core dissolving, releasing benevolent chemicals into my bloodstream, flooding the fear-of-death part of my brain. The pill itself silently selfdestructing in a tiny inward burst, a polymer implosion, discreet and precise and considerate. <> Technology with a human face.
• Self-pity is something I've worked very hard to maintain. Why abandon it just because you grow up? Self-pity is something that children are very good at, which must mean it is natural and important. Imagining yourself dead is the cheapest, sleaziest, most satisfying form of childish self-pity... What wonderful cross-currents of self-pity and self-esteem you are able to wallow in, seeing yourself laid out in a dark suit and tie, looking tanned, fit and rested, as they say of presidents after vacations. But there is something even more childish and satisfying than self-pity, something that explains why I try to see myself dead on a regular basis, a great fellow surrounded by sniveling mourners. It is my way of punishing people for thinking their own lives are more important than mine.'
• 'Stop wearing those dark glasses.'
  'I can't teach Hitler without them.'
  'Why not?'
  'I need them, that's all.'
  'They're stupid, they're useless.'
  'I've built a career,' I said. 'I may not understand all the elements involved but this is all the more reason not to tamper.'
• Winnie was barely into her thirties but she had a sane and practiced eye for the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life. A narrow face partly hidden by wispy brown ringlets, eyes bright and excited. She had the beaky and hollow-boned look of a great wading creature.
• You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give to this complicated process is fear.'
  'Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.'
• 'I'm still sad, Winnie, but you've given my sadness a richness and depth it has never known before.'
  She turned away, blushing.
  I said, 'You're more than a fair-weather friend—you're a true enemy.'
  She turned exceedingly red.
  I said, 'Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.' I watched her blush.
• I chewed and ate, looking only inches past my hands. This is how hunger shrinks the world. This is the edge of the observable universe of food.
• I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a bead-work of bright creation. My own plain hand, crosshatched and whorled in a mesh of expressive lines, a life terrain, might itself be the object of a person's study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void.
• The ruin is built into the creation, I said, which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of future generations.
  Murray said, 'I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.'
• All this as a result of a byproduct of insecticide. There's something artificial about my death. It's shallow, unfulfilling. I don't belong to the earth or sky. They ought to carve an aerosol can on my tombstone.'
• The gun created a second reality for me to inhabit. The air was bright, swirling around my head. Nameless feelings pressed thrillingly on my chest. It was a reality I could control, secretly dominate.
• Why was I surprised to find that the bullets were so unmistakably bulletshaped? I guess I thought new names and shapes had been given to just about everything in the decades since I first became aware of objects and their functions. The weapon was gunshaped, the little pointed projectiles reassuringly bullet-shaped. They were like childhood things you might come across after forty years, seeing their genius for the first time.
• I decided to attempt mouth-tomouth. I leaned over him, used my thumb and index finger to clothes-pin his nose and then tried to work my face down into his. The awkwardness and grim intimacy of the act made it seem all the more dignified under the circumstances. All the larger, more generous.
• My nun said something to them and soon all four of us were charmingly engaged in a childlike dialogue. We did colors, items of clothing, parts of the body. I felt much more at ease in this German-speaking company than I had with the Hitler scholars. Is there something so innocent in the recitation of names that God is pleased?
• It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.'... 'Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe.
• The sky takes on content, feeling, an exalted narrative life. The bands of color reach so high, seem at times to separate into their constituent parts. There are turreted skies, light storms, softly falling streamers. It is hard to know how we should feel about this. Some people are scared by the sunsets, some determined to be elated, but most of us don't know how to feel, are ready to go either way.