The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream." It’s almost as though our fear is what brings it on. If we could learn not to be afraid, we could live forever.”

At the end, I put the book down on my lap, put my hands up to the sides of my head, fingertips pressed gently into my hair, then pulled my hands away while making the sound of an explosion quietly with my lips. b) "satire" whose effect is similar to assaulting the reader with a blunt instrument. Whether it's the repeated use of such tired and obvious devices as the random scattering of consumer product names throughout the text, or having his protagonist lead the department of "Hitler Studies", there's nothing remotely smart about it. This kind of heavy-handed bludgeoning is the hallmark of a very inferior writer. It insults the intelligence. Authors are generally praised for demonstrating subtlety and wit - why should DeLillo be given a pass? Not the least fascinating aspect of the book lay in the fact that the author recognized the dramatic potential of the events. Claiming to have tried to “uncover the classic dramatic form of the story itself” Starkey insisted that “here is real Greek tragedy,” with “a beginning, a middle and an end.” Interestingly, in the notebook Arthur Miller started at this time, he noted that “It must be ‘tragic’” and, when The Crucible opened in New York, in 1953, he remarked, “Salem is one of the few dramas in history with a beginning, a middle and an end.” Desde aquel infausto día a principios del siglo XX en que a un humilde emigrante judío de origen austriaco afincado en los Estados Unidos llamado Edward Bernays se le ocurrió aplicar las novedosas teorías de su tío —un tal Freud— al mundo de la publicidad, el consumismo se ha convertido en rasgo principal de la sociedad occidental.

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Pero todo intento es inútil; la verdad, si es que existe, es relativa y lo auténtico y lo artificial se confunden hasta fundirse en una misma materia. What if there were a pill that that fixes the fear-of-death part of the brain and cures you of this "condition"? Would you take it? Because we’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.” stars out of 5. Extremely memorable with something verging on greatness that seems frustratingly forever on the tip of DeLillo's tongue. I wish I could split the rating and give it a 4 thematically but a 5 for style. Sometimes a sentence would rise up seemingly out of nowhere and take my breath away. It's seriously that good, on a small scale. I have critiques of how everything hangs together in a bigger picture sense, and how belabored the point gets at certain stages, but I will remember this book for a lifetime.

One dictionary definition of a crucible is a place of extreme heat, “a severe test.” John Proctor and the others summoned before the court in Salem discovered the meaning of that. Yet such tests, less formal, less judicial, less public, are the small change of daily life. Betrayal, denial, rash judgment, self-justification are remote neither in time nor place. The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp; but what happens to individuals is another matter and within the range of mortal understanding. The Salem story has the virtue of being a highly individualized affair. Witches in the abstract were not hanged in Salem; but one by one were brought to the gallows such diverse personalities as a decent grandmother grown too hard of hearing to understand a crucial question from the jurors, a rakish, pipe-smoking female tramp, a plain farmer who thought only to save his wife from molestation, a lame old man whose toothless gums did not deny expression to a very salty vocabulary.... And after you have studied their lives faithfully, a remarkable thing happens; you discover that if you really know the few, you are on your way to understanding the millions. By grasping the local, the parochial even, it is possible to make a beginning at understanding the universal. I am having a very difficult time trying to decide if White Noise is actually an intelligent work which I completely failed to understand. Or is it just one of those novels which try to sound all smart and deep and profound, but do not actually make much sense. That flaw, as so often in Miller’s work, was to be sexual, not least because there seemed a sexual flavor to the language of those who confessed to possession by the devil and who were accused of dancing naked in a community in which both dancing and nakedness were themselves seen as signs of corruption. But that hardly seemed possible when Abigail Williams and John Proctor, who were to become the central characters in Miller’s drama, were eleven and sixty, respectively. Accordingly, at Miller’s bidding she becomes seventeen and he thirty-five, and so they begin to move toward each other, the gap narrowing until a sexual flame is lit. Elizabeth Proctor, who had managed an inn, now becomes a solitary farmer’s wife, cut off from communion not only with her errant husband, who has strayed from her side, but also in some degree from the society of Salem. I understand this now to be a novel of anxiety. I was born the year this book was published. That must make me Wilder, the barely verbal tricycle rider. And now it is me who looks ahead toward an uncertain future while my own past grows strange, unfamiliar. But I am all right. I am all right. I am all right. My parents were all right, and I am all right, and the kids are all right.

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Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Southpaw’s manager unscrews the top of an inkwell and hands him a quill. Southpaw dips his quill and writes down, Southpaw 909. That's what it all comes down to in the end," he said. "A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?" The airborne toxic event. Cool name for a band? These guys thought so. Not if you look like that it's not.I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." -Stephen King Compere: Ladies and gentlemen, you might not know this man, but he is a true heavyweight, some say the heavyweight champion of the Word…