My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He’d watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn’t completely convinced he could not do it. It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things. .Don DeLillo
About This Quote
A boy who thinks he can make planes explode in mid-air must be careful not to get caught. One day, Jeff had the misfortune of attending a plane crash. He stood staring dumbly at the wreckage, his mouth agape, when suddenly he heard his teacher say, “Jeffrey! Jeffrey, are you there?” He looked around him and saw no one, only the wreckage that used to be a plane. The teacher was talking to him.
Source: Underworld
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