Seems like Delillo took a bunch of postmodern conceits (funny names like Calliope Shrub and Elux Troxl; precocious kid; unrealistic, posturing dialogue; near-opaque symbols; metafiction) and threw them together in a broken blender. Everything works well for the first half, the elements blending together and whirling faster and faster like the book's aborigine. Then something goes horribly wrong; the top pops off, causing the blender to spew postmodernism all over the walls. And as we all know, postmodernism is notoriously difficult to clean up.

So what is there to enjoy in this book? Well, it was interesting to see a direct ancestor of IJ's Hal in Billy Twillig. Not only is Billy freakishly smart, he also has the same childish wit as Hal. Two examples:

"...noting in the mirror how unlike himself* he looked, neat enough in his sport coat and tie but unusually pale and somehow tired, as though this manufactured air were threatening his very flesh, drawing out needed chemicals and replacing them with evil solvents made in New Jersey."

"'...lecture tours, talk shows, a quickie biography, t-shirts, funny buttons. The ancillary rights alone could set us up for years. Endorsements, puzzles, games, mathematics LPs . . . Once the incision heals. And the hair grows back. Leaving you without a scar. We'll package you with somebody you really admire. There must be one special figure in the world community of scientists. Who's your hero? Tell us and we'll get him.'
'People from the Bronx don't have heroes.'"

And there's one other thing: people don't often say this about Delillo, but he has a tendency to (despite his habitual self-obfuscating) drop little bits of nearly-sentimental, life-affirming philosophy. I've written about this before here, but here's an example from Ratner's Star:

"Everywhere is a place. All places share this quality. Is there any real difference between going to a gorgeous mountain resort with beautiful high thin waterfalls so delicate and ribbonlike they don't even splash when they hit bottom--waterfalls that plash; is this so different from sitting in a kitchen with bumpy linoleum and grease on the wall behind the stove across the street from a gravel pit? What are we talking about? Two places, that's all. There's nowhere you can go that isn't a place. So what's such a difference? If you can understand this idea, you'll never be unhappy. Think of the word 'place.' A sun deck with views of gorgeous mountains. A tiny dark kitchen. These share the most important of all things anything can share. They are places. The word 'place' applies in both cases. In this sense, how do we distinguish between them? How do we say one is better or worse than the other? They are equal in the most absolute of ways. Grasp this truth, sonny, and you'll never be sad."

Logically questionable, but sure makes you feel better if you happen to live in a really crappy place.

*bonus dissociation/fragmentation!

"Sitting alone in a room isn't enough. We should turn out the lights as well. The only way to survive is to curtail one's perspective, to exist as close to one's center as possible."
- Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star



I'm going to have to chew on this one. Which means two things. I'll either run off and never return or chew, swallow and excrete something in good time. IT is a tangle for me. Clearly, parts I loved; parts I think I understood; and parts that are absolutely off the charts. I can see this novel reappearing in parts of the Underworld, Zero K, Point Omega, etc. DeLillo loves exploring Man on the edge.



I should also note, as far as Delillo's published novels, I am now a DeLillo completist. I still have a few more short stories, a few more plays, and Amazons by Cleo Birdwell to read, but if I was checking off his 'also by' books in the front of his most recent book, I'm a completist. I'll call it a small 'c' complete and leave it there. I just ordered a copy of Amazons so I can check that off and am scrambling around trying to locate his early short-stories, so I'll also update once that is done.

Un libro que es como el amor: empezó con muchas esperanzas y acabó en monotonía. Primero lo bueno: no tiene miedo de burlarse de todos, lingüistas, físicos, biólogos, matemáticos, gente que trabaja con la ciencia computacional, nadie, nadie se libra de una mirada irónica, crítica y deliciosamente mordaz. Lo malo: el texto se vuelve pesado, denso, como un chicle después de cinco minutos pierde el interés a partir de la página trescientos; eso, y el personaje puede resultar insufrible en ocasiones. No sé si es porque no estoy acostumbrado a este tipo de estética, pero sentí el deseo de abandonar la lectura en varias ocasiones.

Leeré más de Don DeLillo. Aunque pienso dejar pasar un tiempo antes de hacerlo.

I make no review - Billy Twillig

The funniest D.D. I’ve read. Brilliant, as you might expect, coming from the prophet. Surely recommend.

His other work, the later work, appears so effortless. With practiced grace D.D. interweaves the strange, the stranger, the funny, and the devastatingly human into Fonz level coolness. His books are cool. They make you feel cool. They are cool to say you’ve read. Ratners is a bit early in the cannon, however, and therefore not as effortless. This is to the benefit of the book. D.D. tries some shit in this one, and it’s obvious when he does. And most often he succeeds. It’s fun to see the master in his early stages, making big choices and doing so well. You can see those first few bricks in his yellow road. They’re all in here. The cosmic babble of Point Omega. The depression and anxiety of Mao 2. The jive and flashbacks of Underworld. The cold mad science of Zero K. The kooky cast and late game genre bend of White Noise. And the relentless meet cutes of Cosmopolis. Sure, it gets a little dirty near the end (plot, presentation, content) but even this breakdown appears to be a symptom of the thematic elements contained there-in. No one survives being too smart, especially not this novel. Plus, the book is funny as hell.

As is his frequent M.O., D.D. Kicks the later half of the novel into a different gear. He toys with perspective and POV, exploding his style and prose, pushing the limits of what a sentence, a paragraph, a page, can accomplish. There are no obvious training wheels to help us through. Instead the solution is far more subtle. He has faith in us. He wants us to keep up, to follow along, to understand, and therefore he ensures that we do. He demonstrates expertly the fluidity with which he is able to train the reader to ascend to the highest levels of his post-modern chuckle fest and live inside an ever changing vibe. Sometimes perspective hopping multiple times within a single sentence. Having finished this book, I feel as though my mind just finished a session of hot yoga. D.D. limbers up the synapses. The psychosis he coerces sweats out the toxins. And the mathematics? Beyond me, I assure you, though this did little to harshen the buzz. They added to the experience in the way fact bolsters fiction. They are presented like the master works of art in his other novels. He knows what he is talking about, he appreciates these things with a critical and practiced eye, and therefore, we do too. This book is good. It’s funny. And it’s D.D. flirting with Sci-fi. Doesn’t get much better. Read it, yeah? I’m nodding my head.

Somebody once told me that Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star is an inscrutable novel, impossible to interpret and impossible to understand. I took this as a challenge. After all, I’ve read supposedly impossible books like Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Gravity’s Rainbow. I’ve plowed through The White Goddess by Robert Graves and managed to make some sense out of Heidegger’s Being and Time and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. The trick to understanding these books is knowing what to read for, where to look for it, and how to separate the main ideas from the noise and irrelevant details. And especially be careful when listening to others who have read these books and obviously didn’t understand them, but felt a need to explain them anyways. Whether I am guilty of this or not will be left to others to decide. My take on Ratner’s Star is that it is a picaresque-style novel and that Billy Twillig is one of the least important characters in the narrative.

Billy Twillig is a prodigal scholar. At the age of fourteen, he wins the Nobel Prize for mathematics due to his work with zorgs, a branch that only six people in the world are able to understand. Billy gets taken to a secretly-located institution to work on an assignment to decode a message received from aliens in outer space. Billy, unsurprisingly, acts like a teenager despite his advanced skills, an aspect of him that never gets fully explored by DeLillo in the narrative. He is equal parts cheeky and horny, taking every chance he can get to ask questions of the adults that deprecate them but never himself. The institute itself seems, at times, more like a lunatic asylum than it does a research facility. DeLillo says that this first half of the book was modeled on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I didn’t pick up on that by myself, but after having learned that, it fits more or less.

The other scientists are eccentric, to say the least. After arriving, Billy encounters some of them in an artificial, man-made Elysian field. One of the first he meets is Cyril, a scholar working with a team of linguists to define the word “science”. This task is harder than first imagined as they can not agree to where the parameters of the definition lie. Some of them argue that primitive magic, as described by Frazer in The Golden Bough, should be considered part of the definition because those folk magic and customs were devised for the same reasons that science was invented; the purpose was to understand nature and the universe and to exert some sort of control over it for the benefit of humanity. Modern science is nothing more than a precise and more finely tuned form of magic.

Throughout the course of the discussion, Billy is introduced to some female scientists who study the natural elements and he think of them as nothing less than Pagan deities. After assigning one of them the characteristics of a water goddess, he spies on her while she is bathing only to be chastised by her when she catches him. This scene alludes to Artemis, the Greek goddess of chastity, who caught Actaeon spying on her in the woods. This Paganism is all significant because it introduces a theme that pervades throughout the entire book, the primitivism of science as it encounters the frontiers of human knowledge and also the disconnection between language and reality. Since thought, science, and mathematics are all products of language, all of which are tools used to comprehend what we encounter as real, nothing can ever be known in full. The signifier can never be equal to the signified. In the context of comparing Pagan magic and its transition into science, the same questions are foundations for both endeavors with science introducing higher levels of accuracy but also increasing levels of complexity to the point where finding defnite answers may be impossible. Where magic and religion have finality, closure, and the illusion of certainty, science offers only open ended questions that never stop expanding.

Billy Twillig proceeds to meet other strange, eccentric scientists in a similar vein. One is an Indian woman from the untouchable class who studies animal communication and how they are able to think without language. Again, this is another commentary on language and the nature of thought. How can we even use language to comprehend thought that manifests without language? Considering the woman is untouchable, Billy wants to know what would happen if he touches her leg. “Nothing, obviously,” is the woman’s answer, rendering the concept of “untouchable” an empty set. There are also two sleazy gangster types who speak an odd mishmash of languages and left me wondering if they were actually space aliens. They represent the Honduran Syndicate and wish to recruit Billy to manipulate international financial markets. Yet another doctor, claiming to be a lapsed Gypsy, whatever that means, and wants to get rich by turning Billy into a super-computer by inserting brain-accelerating electrodes into his head. Also in a secret ceremony, Billy meets the old scientist Ratner who lent his name to Ratner’s Star, the part of the galaxy where the coded message came from. Ratner was an astronomer who abandoned science as a career and embraced the mysticism of Hasidic Judaism when he realized that science can not answer the question of what happens when we die. On his deathbed during the ceremony, Ratner tells Billy his life story and then whispers the ultimate secret of life into Billy’s ear, but the secret is the most mundane statement you could possibly imagine. But the symbolism of the old passing traditional knowledge down to the young is what is most important here. It also exemplifies how mysticism is a closed system of information whereas science is, by contrast, an open system.

Those are some of the minor characters from the first half. One of the more important characters is Billy’s father who doesn’t contribute too much to the overall narrative, but does introduce one important theme. He takes Billy down into the subways of New York City, where it is dark and there is a danger of getting hit by a train, to teach him that the basis of life is fear. In this instance Billy directly experiences the fear of death since getting hit by a train in the dark would inevitably result in death. Indirectly, DeLillo is pointing out how the fear of death leads to magic, mysticism, and religious thought. Through Billy’s father, DeLillo also points out that fear can lead people to live lives of absurdity since the father owns a guard dog that no one is scared of except for young Billy, develops a neurosis over a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, walks the streets prepared for brawls that never happen, and almost assaults an elderly and frail Chinese man who he mistakes for a mugger. The father also makes the mistake of admiring a tall and talented basketball player for being the kind of son he wishes he had even though the athlete makes a dumb decision that ruins his career while Billy goes on to be a success. The father even considers murdering Billy out of fear of how the boy, unusually small for his age and full of unusual ideas, will make the family look. The father’s fear of death does not lead him to make wise or sensible decisions about life which may be DeLillo’s critique of religion and the possibility of science as an alternative.

Then there is Endor, the mathematician who was assigned to crack the code from Ratner’s Star before Billy came along. Endor lost his patience, moved to a remote location, and spent the rest of his life living in a hole, eating grubs, and digging a tunnel. This latter project parallels the scientific task in that research involves digging oneself deeper and deeper into a hole that eventually will lead to some truth. Endor, as we learn later in the book, actually solved the code before seemingly going crazy. After doing so, he realized that the tunnel digging involved in solving the puzzle created a tunnel leading nowhere as the answer to the original problem ultimately led to more questions rather than one answer. So Endor quit and began digging a tunnel that literally had no purpose and led nowhere. But it did mean something symbolically. The entire book is full of tunnels and hallways all joining up with enclosed rooms, caverns, cells, and enclosures. These may or may not allude to the kabbalah diagram that Ratner describes to Billy as he dies.

In fact, there is one astrophysicist who explains to Billy that black holes are entrances to tunnels and anything that enters them re-emerges in another part of the galaxy. Every star corresponds to a black hole. I am not atronomically literate enough to know if this is true, but it serves a purpose in the book. The man who explains this to Billy is Orang Mohole, the man who discovered moholes, or pockets of hidden space that permeate the cosmos. This character is significant because his moholes play a major part in explaining where the message from Ratner’s Star came from and why they took so long to reach Earth. Mohole is also a pervert and a bipolar psychotic who enjoys inventing sex toys as if he is preoccupied with penetrating into the secret spaces of women’s bodies. He also sometimes goes crazy and shoots people at random. It is possible that he is the man having a firefight with the police when the riddle of the coded message is solved. As if he entered a narrative black hole and re-emerged in another part of the book, kind of like the Aboriginal shaman with white hair and one eye.

If the first half of the book is meant to portray the different aspects of science, two things are certain: one is that teamwork is necessary for scientific research; none of these people are working on their own, but rather they are each deeply involved in one complex part of a larger scientific problem. The other deduction, and the other side of that teamwork, is that individual scientists are lonely, eccentric, and socially isolated people who often risk their sanity for the cause of discovering higher truths. The fact that science, as an open system of information, can never be complete, drives some practitioners into mental territories that suggest locations on the autism spectrum. And all these characters in the first half do represent aspects of science. Ratner represents its mystical element. The Honduran Syndicate represent the exploitation of science for technocratic power, the lapsed Gypsy is the commercialization of science, and Cyril shows how science, in its inability to finally and completely explain the nature of existence, is always at the frontier of human knowledge, while Endor portrays the problematic side of science in that it can never fully explain nature the way religion can.

By the start of the second half of the book, one thing becomes clear; Billy Twillig’s purpose is to provide a structure to the novel and a thread that holds the whole mess together. He is like Virgil leading Dante through Hell in The Divine Comedy, only we, the readers, are Dante and Billy does not tell the stories of the lost souls we encounter, rather he lets them speak for themselves.

In this second half, Billy continues to serve his narrative function as the main character but not the most important character since that role gets filled by Softly, a drug and sex addicted dwarf with a deformed and asymmetrical body. He takes Billy into some underground tunnels to a cavern compound below the institute where they have been working. Softly has assembled a team of scientists to construct a language based purely on logic and mathematics that will be utilizable as a tool so that any intelligent living being on Earth or in outer space can communicate with perfect efficiency, without any ambiguities or misunderstandings. Wasn’t Esperanto meant to do something similar? Softly explains to Billy that he originally brought him to the institute for this secret project. When Billy asks why he had to spend so much time working on deciphering the message from Ratner’s Star even though no one actually cared about it, Softly explains that that project was nothing but preparation for this more important task. In terms of structure, this is the author’s way of telling us that the first half of the novel introduces all the themes of the book and the second half puts them into play. The metanarrative is actually encapsulated in the narrative. Is this Chomsky’s recursion at a semantic level? Remember how most of Moby Dick was descriptions of whales and the esoteric language associated with the practice of whaling? The layman needs to learn all of that so they don’t get lost in technical descriptiveness when the action of the novel begins. Well, that worked for Herman Melville, but not so much for Don DeLillo. Ratner’s Star reaches a narrative plateau rather than a narrative peak. While Billy isolates himself, refusing to do any work, the others set about the task of creating the language and, by God, they create it. Oh yeah, and Billy cracks the code of Ratner’s Star too. No big surprises or conventional conflict resolutions.

But like the first half of the book, the second half is really all about the characters. Where previously characters were meant to represent different aspects of the scientific endeavor, now the characters in the project are brought into three-dimensionality for an exploration of their individual motives. One man works on this project to advance his career and status in the scientific community, one woman uses it as a means of fueling her own philosophical theories about language. A third is engaged in the project to reconcile his identity as a Chinese-American man, being unable to fit completely into either category of “Chinese” or “American”; He latter concludes that language barriers prevent him from being wholly one or the other. The most poignant portrayals of the inner lives of the characters come from Softly and Jean Venable, an author he hires to write a book about the project. Jean is actually a talentless writer with a turbulent psyche and an unfulfilling social life, possibly even suffering from mental illness. Softly chose her because he wants the story to be told to the general public by someone who doesn’t understand science; in other words, he seeks fame through mass popularity while also seeking prominence in intellectual circles through his real work. Actually, though, he is more preoccupied with using Jean for sex to overcompensate for his physical malformations. As we get to know Softly more, we learn that he is motivated by insecurity and self-loathing. He refuses to look into mirrors out of disgust and tries to conquer the world to make up for his inadequacy.

Otherwise, the scientific themes in the second half are really just expansions on the themes introduced in the first half. One theme that deserves some attention here is that of mathematics. A lot of readers are put off to this book because of it, but you don’t actually need to do any math to follow what is going on since DeLillo limits his exploration to theoretical mathematics rather than applied mathematics. What I get from this book is the need for math to remain an open system of communication so that mathematics can expand eternally and adapt to scientific changes as more knowledge accumulates. The paradox is that while pure mathematics deal in absolute truths, applied math needs to be constantly readjusted to function since science is a process of never-ending self-correction. Pure mathematics can only be self-referential thereby posing the question of whether they are pure or not when we utilize them to explain scientific objectivity. Or do we, in reverse, adjust our perceptions of objectivity to correspond with the ultimate truths of pure mathematics? Of course, this is postmodernism so there can ultimately be no solution to these problems. Is postmodernism meant to be an admission that there are limitations to our intellectual abilities or is it merely just a cop out? When reading Wittgenstein I think it’s the former, when reading Derrida I think it’s the latter.

In the end, Ratner’s Star certainly has its flaws. The anecdotes about Billy’s childhood don’t lend a whole lot to the overall story and I think some of them should have been written to completion or else left out entirely. I guess in postmodern novels, not everything makes sense because the world is just that way. Pynchon can get away with this, but here DeLillo appears to have made some poor editorial choices. Billy could have been developed as a character more too. I know he is more of a narrative device than a real character, but this still leaves a huge void in the center of the novel that makes it underwritten which is strange considering how overwritten everything else in this book is. Speaking of Pynchon, DeLillo intended this to be an homage to him. But instead of reading like an homage, it comes off as derivative and unoriginal. There are secret plots, paranoia, underground tunnels, secret societies, communications theory, arcane technological jargon, loose plot threads, sexual perversion, non sequiturs, narrative derailments, and even a couple songs stuck in at random places. It’s as if DeLillo took every element from Pynchon’s first three novels and repurposed them for his own novel. It is often too close to Pynchon to be good, but isn’t that also postmodernism? There is never anything new, only copies of copies of copies? In DeLillo’s case it doesn’t quite work. But this novel is far from being a failure. The well-drawn characters are unforgettable and full of depth, so much so that within a sentence or two they feel complete and fully realized. This is a trick few authors can master.

Would Ratner’s Star stand on its own for a reader who had never heard of Pynchon? I think it would. There is enough brilliance here to be independently evaluated without the overbearing shadow of the great and mysterious Ruggles. DeLillo is full of his own ideas and this is a unique exploration of language, logic, science, and mathematics that could never be recreated by anyone else. DeLillo’s later novels were definitely better, and Ratner’s Star is not for the casual reader, but for those who make the effort, and especially those who have an eagle’s eye for fine details, reading this book is a rich and rewarding experience.

Continuing my reread of DeLillo from the beginning. I remember not loving Ratner’s Star the first go around. Meh the second time.

I'm struggling. Disjointed, disharmonious and downright devilish.

Still, I can't imagine ever finishing this. DeLillo is just not getting through to me here.

Don, pal, you're a wanker.

You've written an absolutely brilliant book. To make a Menippean satire of intellectual enterprise so compelling is an incredible feat. To play with its foundational analogy of Plato's cave (in which we by 'getting to the bottom of things' can make our 'way up to the light' of ideal truth etc.), and to have its apotheosis be a complete self-debasement is fitting. The concomitant transformation of a whole genre of sci-fi novels ('first contact novels') along the way needed doing, really. His plurality of writing styles is impressive and enables him to incorporate even straightforwardly touching passages that you wouldn't expect from a book with such grave ambitions (eg. 'I am not just this', in the second part 'Reflections').

Ultimately though, its implicit criticisms often seem unfocused. The copious amounts of slapstick and the all-encompassing pessimism make it hard to take seriously. For the most part, you pander. It's one thing to show the futile, frenzied and suppressed desperation that seems to lie at the basis of 'scientific' research, it's another to have characters suggest that conceptualisation is at best erotic ("All language is innuendo"). Your attempt at something like the former becomes banal through the latter. I don't see why you would have your characters be so overtly obsessed with sex, and have most relations between them be determined by stereotypical gender roles. The nerdy sophistication, from this regard, comes across as another aspect of a old-fashioned, peculiarly male voice.

Tiresome really, to comment on so much, and not even because big ideas are weighing down on the contents. There are no truly big ideas. This time the postmodern drivel is not 'deep', 'mind-blowing' or 'mind-expanding'; just games confined by rules all too familiar. Look, Delillo: you're a magician. The showing of cards was neat, but ultimately of little significance. Maybe try your hand at a different game?

Math + fiction, how can you go wrong? This book starts out well as the main character is enlisted to decode an enigmatic radio transmission received from space. This takes place in a futuristic compound centered around Space Brain--a super computer that is mapping the universe. The protagonist, an insanely gifted child mathematician, encounters an odd assortment of scientists and academics and there are some interesting thoughts around the relation of math, science, and culture. From here, there seemed to be an over-abundance of intriguing directions that this book could take. Unfortunately it misses them all and ends up deep underground lost in an impossible project.

Estoy seguro que este libro es de cuatro o cinco estrellas, pero nomás le entendí tres.

Not really a review. Just joined goodreads and want to take some notes on some of the parts of books I read. Especially someone like Delillo.

This is interesting so far. I can really see some of the other themes that Delillo explored in later books "Underworld" and "The Names".

Really amusing so far have been the one guys 500 page dissertation on the "meaning" of Science. Also the part where Billy asked Una to see her tits. Page 43 2 chapters in.

Page 94:

"The only good thing about the trip, from Billy's viewpoint, was the part where he approached the helicoptor with ducked head and un-natural scuttling steps. Although he wasn't wearing a hat he put his right hand to his head as he proceeded importantly to the aircraft. Despite his bent-over shoulder-first approach, he didn't feel foolish. He liked getting on the helicoptor; it was, after all, an executive helicoptor and he felt as he imagined six-figure executives probably when they duck under the blades and fly off to lavish spas for rubdowns and hard bargaining."

Paragraphs like the above are one of the reasons I really like Delillo.

Definitely liking Billy T.'s character. He reacts like a normal kid would to the madness that is surrounding him up to this point at least. Really laughing at the Mutuka (white "aborigine" former scientist speaking to the group) part.

Page 105:

"Three people got up and walked out. He (Billy) didn't know whether they were leaving out of boredom or because Mutuka had claimed the aborigine was capable of traveling into outer space. Both circumstances were equally believable."..."Our Visitor himself may or may not posses a third eye. Such are the secrets of the bush.

Ten people walked out."

Page 228, 251, 266...

Page 272:

"That distinctive quality of parade music, a summons to come running, to gather together in public and allow whatever loyalty imbues marchers and band members to quicken likewise the communal spirit and reduce all colors to one; that special emotion, as the music drops into time and distance, is swept pathetically away, to be replaced by faint wonder at the depths of regret that often follow such fleeting revelry."

After Softly arrives and that passage describes Billy's thoughts or emotions when he mentions logik.

Page 275-276:

"They were alone in the samll garden. The afternoon had lost some of its rabid glare. A smell of mown clover rose from the earth. It summoned a special presentness, that particular time-sense in which animal faculties conspire to rouse the spirit, the ordering force of memory, and Billy was stirred to relive some elemental moments separately blessed within the flow of past events. They could be counted, the times in which he'd guided a length of string through the hole he'd nail-scraped in a chestnut, the lumps of clay he'd thumbed and gouged into some amorphous model, the cherry pits he'd buried and people he'd learned to believe. They could be counted, the times in which he'd flexed his toes in sense wet sand, the bites of ice cream he'd chunked out of dixie cups with a flat wooden spoon, the caves he'd made in in his mashed potatoes, the pages he'd detached from his composition notebook, tearing down along the row of wire rings, and the white flakes that bounced down out of the air as a result, also distinct and countable. They could be named and listed, the places he'd hidden from danger, the nights he thought would never end."