If I can't learn from this, I can't learn from anything

So … I started Part 2 of Don Delillo’s Underworld: Elegy For Left Hand Alone. It’s a terrific novel, of course but when I reached page 170 the text simply took off. This is what writing is about.

“You feel sorry for yourself. You think you’re missing something and you don’t know what it is. You’re lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash. You used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe. Now you’re a lost speck. You look at old cars and recall a purpose, a destination.”

And on page 173 there’s the geo-political analysis of Marvin Lundy”

“Excuse me but if you rotate the map of Latvia ninety degrees so the eastern border goes on top, this is exactly the shape that’s on Gorbachev’s head. In other words when he’s lying in bed at night and his wife comes over to give him a glass of water and an aspirin, that’s Latvia she’s looking at.”

But best of all, there’s the breathtaking description of the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island on pages 184 to 186. Try this for size:

“He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza – only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All this ingenuity and labour, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one. Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure. And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, it’s shape computer-plotted by the day and the hour. In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami. Brian felt a surge of enlightenment. He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He dealt in human behaviour, people’s habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.”

Brilliant.