(3089/898) The Names

396) Marriage is something made from available materials. In this sense it's improvised, it's almost offhand. Maybe that is why we know so little about it. It's too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood.

Don DeLillo
The Names (1982)

397) To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands you are granted immunities and broad freedoms.

Don DeLillo
The Names (1982)

398) We were doubters [...] Skeptics of the slightly superior type. The Christian dispersion. It was one of the many things [we] agreed on, rockbound doubt, not that we'd ever discussed it. It was just there, or not there, something we knew about each other. The quasi-stellar object, the quantum event, these were the sources of our speculation and wonder. Our bones were made of material that came swimming across the galaxy from exploded stars. This knowledge was our shared prayer, our chant.

Don DeLillo
The Names (1982)

399) America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, our character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need we provide. A myth is a useful thing. People expect us to absorb the impact of their grievances.

Don DeLillo
The Names (1982)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 755 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.