Parenting & Family Quote by Don DeLillo

DeLillo’s line reads like a casual shrug, but it’s really a quiet origin story for the particular dread his novels specialize in: the feeling that history has an endpoint, and you can hear it humming under the fluorescent lights. “Last things” is an old Catholic phrase with a built-in dramatic arc - death, judgment, heaven, hell - a narrative of final accounting. DeLillo isn’t just confessing a background detail; he’s pointing to a formative technology of attention. Catholicism trains you to scan the ordinary for ultimacy, to treat everyday objects and routines as if they might be evidence in a cosmic case file.

The hedging matters. “I think,” “a sense,” “probably” - he refuses the clean psychobiographical explanation. That reticence is part of the DeLillo method: certainty is suspect, but patterns are undeniable. He’s not claiming belief so much as admitting a residue, a mental architecture that persists after doctrine fades. In his fiction, apocalypses aren’t always fireballs; they’re system failures, media storms, chemical spills, market panics - secular eschatology. The Catholic childhood doesn’t supply answers, it supplies a template for waiting: suspense, guilt, ritual, the expectation that meaning will arrive as revelation or disaster.

Contextually, this helps explain why DeLillo’s work so often treats America like a religious project that forgot its religion and kept the rituals: consumption, spectacle, surveillance. “Last things” becomes the mood of late modern life, where the end is always forecast, monetized, televised, and somehow still intimate.