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+---
+title: The Names
+author: Don Delillo
+pubyear: 1982
+edition: Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf
+readdate: September 18, 2014 03:47:50 PM
+tags: fiction
+
+--- 
+
+He paused. "I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version." 
+page: 23
+notes: Said by the character Owen, the archaeologist, talking about going home versus going on to India.
+
+--
+
+"Have you ever written?" she said.
+"Never. I used to think it would be grand to be a poet. I was very young, this was long ago, I'm sure I thought a poet was a delicate pale fellow with a low-grade fever." 
+page:77
+notes: Said by Owen, talking about his childhood.
+
+--
+
+My life was full of routine surprises. One day I was watching runners from Marathon dodge taxis near the Athens Hilton, the next I was turning a corner in Istanbul to see a gypsy leading a bear on a leash. I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. 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. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.
+page:43-44
+notes: inner monologue by the narrator who is a "risk analyst"
+
+--
+
+People were always giving her shirts. Their own in most cases. She looked good in everything; everything fit. If a shirt was too loose, too big, the context would widen with the material and this became the point, this was the fit. The shirt would sag fetchingly, showing the girl, the sunny tomboy buried in hand-me-down gear. She used to snatch things off hangers in Yonge Street basements, the kind of shapeless stuff men wore north. These were stores with hunting knives in faded scabbards in the window, huge khaki anoraks with fur-lined hoods, and she'd grab a pair of twelve-dollar corduroys that became immediately hers,setting off her litheness, the close-skinned physical sense she ex-pressed even sprawled across an armchair, reading. Her body had efficient lines that took odd clothing best, the weathered, the shrunken, the dull. People were pleased to see her in their work-shirts, old sweaters. She was not a friend who asked many favors or required of others a steadfastly sympathetic nature. They were flattered, really, when she took a shirt. 
+page:105
+notes: Narrator inner monologue about his ex-wife.
+
+--
+
+"New ways to think about death. All the banking and technology and oil money create an uneasy flow through the region, a complex set of dependencies and fears. Everyone is there, of course. Not just Americans. They're all there. But the others lack a certain mythical quality that terrorists find attractive.""Good, keep going.""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, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort them-selves, 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. Interesting, when I talk to a Mideastern businessman who expresses affection and respect for the U.S., I automatically assume he's either a fool or a liar. The sense of grievance affects all of us, one way or another."
+"What percentage of these grievances is justified?"
+I pretended to calculate.
+page: 114
+notes: the narrator talking at one of the many dinner scenes with all the expat business people in Athens.
+
+--
+
+Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. 
+
+This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.It is not surprising, therefore, to see men with submachineguns, to see vultures squatting on the baggage vehicles set at the end of the tarmac in the airport in Bombay when one arrives after a night flight from Athens. 
+
+All of this we choose to forget. We devise a counter-system of elaborate forgetfulness. We agree on this together. And out in the street we see how easy it is, once we're immersed in the thick crowded paint of things, the bright clothes and massed brown faces. But the experience is no less deep because we've agreed to forget it.
+page:254
+notes: inner monologue
+
+--
+
+
+The cows had painted horns. Blue horns in one part of the countryside, red or yellow or green in another. People who painted cows horns had something to say to him, Owen felt.There were cows with tricolor horns. There was a woman in a magenta sari who carried a brass water pot on her head, the garment and the container being the precise colors of the mingled bougainvillea that covered the wall behind her, the dark reddish purple, the tainted gold. He would reflect. These moments werea "control"—a design at the edge of the human surge. The white-clad men with black umbrellas, the women at the river beating clothes in accidental rhythms, hillsides of saris drying in the sun.The epic material had to refine itself in these delicate aquarelles. Or he needed to see it as such. The mind's little infinite. India made him feel like a child. He was a child again, maneuvering fora window seat on the crowded bus. A dead camel, stiff legs jutting. Women in a road crew wearing wide cotton skim, nose rings, hair ornaments, heavy jewelry dangling from their ears,repairing broken asphalt by hand, horn ok please. In the upper castes they calculated horoscopes precisely. 
+page:278
+notes: From Owen's long story about wandering around India.
+
+--
+
+Owen smiled again, thinking how in the midst of this wandering among Jains, Muslims, Sikhs, the Buddhist students in Sarnath, stunned time and again by the fairytale dynamics of Hindu cosmology, he had begun to think of himself once more as a Christian, simply by way of fundamental identification, by way of linking himself to the everyday medley he found around him. When people asked, this is what he said. Christian. How strange it sounded.And how curiously strong a word it seemed, after all these years,to be applied to himself, full of doleful comfort.
+page:281
+notes: From Owen's long story about wandering around India.
+
+--
+
+"How big the world is. They keep telling us it's getting smaller all the time, but it's not, is it? Whatever we do to complicate things makes it bigger. It's all a complication. It's one big tangled thing." She began to laugh. "Modern communications don't shrink the world, the make it bigger. Faster planes make it bigger. They give us more, the connect us to more things. The world isn't shrinking at all. People who say the world is shrinking have never flown Air Zaire in a tropical storm.: I didn't know what she meant by this but it sounded funny. It sounded funny to her too. She had to talk through her laughter. "No wonder people got to school to learn stretching and bending. The world is so big and complicated we don't trust ourselves to figure out anything on our own. No wonder people read books on that tell them how to run, walk and sit. We're trying to keep up with the world, the size of it, the complications.
+page: 323
+notes: Friend's wife Lindsay talking to the narrator.
+