White Noise

Babette said she liked the series J. A. K. and didn’t think it was attention-getting in a cheap sense. To her it intimated dignity, significance and prestige. I am the false character that follows the name around.

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.

You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.” I watch light climb into the rounded summits of high-altitude

“Whatever relaxes you is dangerous. If you don’t know that, I might as well be talking to the wall.”

“To break the spell,” I said. “To get away from routine things. Routine things can be deadly, Vern, carried to extremes. I have a friend who says that’s why people take vacations. Not to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”

This was the night the insane asylum burned down. Heinrich and I got in the car and went to watch. There were other men at the scene with their adolescent boys. Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss a

person’s entire life is the unraveling of this conflict. No wonder we’re bewildered, staggered, shattered.”

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

The seriousness of such an occasion is directly proportionate to the number of bodily emissions you are asked to cull for analysis.