Among the more macabre details from the Norfolk Southern freight train derailment that spilled toxic chemicals all over the small town of East Palestine, Ohio, was the fact that numerous of the local residents had recently been extras in the film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise–a 1985 novel that also features a train derailment spilling toxic chemicals all over a small midwestern town. This all in turn prompted me to re-read White Noise for the first time in years.

The “airborne toxic event” is only one chapter (albeit the longest chapter in the book), although it does influence the action of the entire second half of the novel. Rather, the larger theme of the novel is the various coping mechanisms we in modernity adopt in order to cope with the inescapable awareness of our own mortality. The most quoted line from the novel, for example, is “We seem to think we can escape death by following the rules of good grooming.” That one is spoken in conjunction with the narrator’s wife, Babette, leading classes in good posture at the local senior center. A friend of the narrator’s son decides to break the world record for sitting alone in a glass case with venomous snakes–67 days–only to be bitten within the first four minutes.

The narrator himself, Jack Gladney, is a professor of Hitler studies at a small midwestern university, who secretly can’t speak German–which line of work is initially played for laughs, until it becomes clear near the novel’s end that he had adopted this line of study specifically to subsume himself into a personality so large and horrible that it would overshadow and obviate his own innate fear of death. It doesn’t work. His same wife later starts clandestinely seeing a disgraced pharmacology researcher, the mysterious Mr. Gray, to gain access to a top-secret experimental drug called Dylar that can purportedly suppress one’s fear of death. It also doesn’t work. In the novel’s climax, Jack Gladney takes a gun gifted him by his father-in-law to kill Mr. Gray–yet not so much to avenge the cuckolding, but to get some of that Dylar for himself, as well as find out if (as his colleague Jack absently suggested on a long walk) killing someone else can also become a way of staving off the fear of death. It is here that the novel tips over from dark-comedy into darkness itself–albeit darkness that had clearly been there all long.

I won’t spoil the end; but then, plot is almost tangential to this novel anyways, which is really about how much we all immerse ourselves in pop-culture generally in order to numb and suppress our collective fears of death. Death, it becomes obvious, is the titular “white noise” saturating the background of our lives.

Once, in grad school, I was in a class discussing Herman Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener”, and what to do with the information that the Bartelby–the suicidal, anorexic protagonist at the story’s center–had previously worked in the dead letter’s department at the post office. I was the one who piped up and pointed out what I assumed was the obvious: “Maybe it’s just that Bartelby realized that we’re all just dead letters on our way to the furnace, right?” A pall fell over the room, everyone fell silent and stared forlornly at the table, and the professor only quipped, “Well, April is the cruelest month…” I suddenly found myself in the role of the comic figure, shrugging my shoulders goin’, “What? what’d I say?” I was probably surprised at the classrooms’ response, since one can’t study literature without tripping over the fear of death constantly. I mean, c’mon: Hamlet? In Memoriam? Paradise Lost? The Waste Land? What else are these works about? But then, I’m religious; I fear not oblivion but rather a just God.

Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

Cause now I’m long out of grad school, and sprouting gray hairs much earlier than I expected to, and find myself contemplating what Hugh Nibley called “The Terrible Questions” a little more frequently. We have quoted before literary critic Harold Bloom, who argued:

“What is the essence of religion? Sigmund Freud said it was the longing for the father. Others have called it the desire for the mother or for transcendence. I fear deeply that all these are idealizations, and I offer the rather melancholy suggestion that they would all vanish from us if we did not know that we must die. Religion rises inevitably from our apprehension of our own death. To give meaning to meaninglessness is the endless quest of all religion. When death becomes the center of our consciousness, then religion authentically begins. Of all religions that I know, the one that most vehemently and persuasively defies and denies the reality of death is the original Mormonism of the prophet, seer and revelator Joseph Smith.”

It is currently what the vast majority of western Christianity refers to as the Holy Week, the lead up to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. We have as the LDS Church tended to smugly look down upon the cross-fixation of so much of mainstream Christianity (such was the theme of Jefferey R. Holland’s most recent October Conference talk), claiming that while everyone else focuses on his gruesome death, we instead focus primarily upon his resurrection. Certainly I agree that such should be our ideal. But I still look upon our innumerable meetings and acronyms, our own fixations with CES dress-codes, earrings, white shirts, facial-hair, and investment portfolios, and our endless ranks of MLMs and get-rich-quick-schemes, and I question sometimes how seriously we actually confront death in the face, ourselves.

We sometimes preach that Christ’s Atonement has already saved us all from death, that it is in fact the point of LDS Gospel to exalt us; as such, we tend to treat death as a concern long-resolved. But then I recall how Levi Peterson once wrote an old essay (the name of which escapes me at the moment) about how all our doctrines of eternal exaltation is a little much for him, that he as a wannabe-believer had his hands full just trying to truly have faith in life after death–that the burial shroud we place over our sacramental emblems was what arrested his attention during our worship services more than anything.

Just something to keep in mind as we dye our eggs and set up our Easter baskets for this coming Sunday.