Life & Mortality Quote by Don DeLillo

DeLillo needles the psychic infrastructure of Catholicism: not doctrine as theology, but doctrine as atmosphere. The sentence runs on like an anxious thought you cant stop midstream, mimicking the way mortality can sit in the body as a low-grade alarm. "Any minute now" is deliberately casual, almost comic, and that colloquialism is the point. Catholic dread in DeLillo isnt reserved for plague years or battlefield epiphanies; its built into the ordinary day, a spiritual jump-scare that can go off while youre eating cereal.

The most revealing move is the blunt transaction he sets up between living "in a certain way" and the afterlife's "eternity of pain". Thats not faith as comfort; its faith as compliance technology. The subtext is less about religion than about conditioning: a person trained from childhood to narrate every impulse against an infinite consequence. DeLillo frames it as upbringing, not choice, shifting the focus from individual belief to cultural programming, the way family, school, and ritual make fear feel like common sense.

Contextually, this sits squarely in DeLillos larger project: tracking how modern Americans manage terror, whether through news cycles, consumer habits, or private mythologies. Catholicism here is an early version of the same system - an institution that keeps death permanently in view, then offers the only acceptable script for living with it. The line is cynical, yes, but its also diagnostic: it treats existential panic as something societies organize, monetize, and pass down like heirlooms.