For one of my anthro classes (Drugs, Bodies, Design) I am reading a novel called White Noise by Don DeLillo. I think the band Airborne Toxic Event got their name from the title of Part II. The story doesn’t do much for me, but I love certain passages like this one:
“Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another’s care and protection. Babette and I have turned our lives for each other’s thoughtful regard, turned them in the moonlight in our pale hands, spoken deep into the night about father and mothers, childhood, friendships, awakenings, old loves, old fears. No detail must be left out, not even a dog with ticks or a neighbor’s boy who ate an insect on a dare. The smell of pantries, the sense of empty afternoons, the feel of things as they rained across our skin, things as facts and passions, the feel of pain, loss, disappointment, breathless delight. 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.”
