“The sentence appears near the beginning of the book and it made me feel I was being addressed directly by the writer, whoever he was, a poet maybe, a poet-priest, I like to imagine. ‘Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.’…. And I read this book and began to think of God as a secret, a long unlighted tunnel, on and on. This was my wretched attempt to understand our blankness in the face of God’s enormity. This is what I respected about God. He keeps his secret. And I tried to approach God through his secret, his unknowability. Maybe we can know God through love or prayer or through visions or through LSD but we can’t know him through the intellect. The Cloud tells us this. And so I learned to respect the power of secrets. We approach God through his unmadeness. We are made, created. God is unmade. How can we attempt to know such a being? We don’t know him. We don’t affirm him. Instead we cherish his negation. We wretched weaklings, you see….”

-Don DeLillo, Underworld

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