White Noise

The eleven-year-old face was an expert mask of restrained exasperation.

He was a gaunt young man who seemed suspicious of conversation that strayed outside certain unspecified guidelines.

“Waves and radiation,” he said. “I’ve come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the American home. Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring. It’s like a myth being born right there in our living room, like something we know in a dreamlike and preconscious way. I’m very enthused, Jack.”

The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

We finally agreed that I should invent an extra initial and call myself J. A. K. Gladney, a tag I wore like a borrowed suit.

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.

It was a habit of his, letting the ash dangle. Babette thought he did it to induce feelings of suspense and anxiety in others. It was part of the reckless weather in which he moved.

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.

she does it now, she might not have to do it later. The more you practice something, the less likely it is to actually happen.” “That’s what the consultant