In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Almost Nothing Left of Nowhere: On Don Delillo's The Silence
• Justin Taylor (bio)

1. In a tumbling void

Despite the shortness of the book, a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader [is presumed].

—Einstein, Preface to Relativity: the Special and General Theory (1916)

Jim Kripps, an insurance claims adjuster, and his wife Tessa Berens, a poet, are on a plane. They're flying home from Paris to New York City. Jim is fussing with the flight tracker on his seatback screen. He reports time, altitude, and temperature to Tessa, who tries to remember the first name of "Mr. Celsius" without resorting to looking it up on her phone. At first, she doesn't think she'll be able to manage it, but then she does. "She found this satisfying. Came out of nowhere. There is almost nothing left of nowhere." [End Page 159]

Jim and Tessa will land in Newark, where they plan to take a cab directly to their friends Max Stenner and Diane Lucas's apartment on the Upper West Side, to have dinner and watch the 2022 Super Bowl. Max has placed a big bet on the game. "Let the impulse dictate the logic" is his gambler's creed. (I would argue it's DeLillo's creed as well.) Max never reveals the details or the stakes of his bets to anyone. Martin Dekker, the other guest at the gathering, is a former student of Diane's. She's a retired physics professor, and Martin is a physics teacher himself now, at a charter high school in the Bronx. It is noted in passing that "for the past year Diane has been telling the young man to return to earth." What does that mean? Tough to say. Martin has an outsize interest in Einstein. "I'm sticking with Einstein no matter what the theorists have disclosed or predicted or imagined," he declaims. "He said it and then we saw it. Billions of times more massive than our sun. He said it many decades ago. His universe became ours."

Martin is particularly consumed by Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. He is taken with its document-ness and human traces, what Walter Benjamin would have called its aura. "We can see him think," Martin gushes, thrilled by the inks that Einstein used, his marginalia and cross outs, "his handwriting, his formulas, his letters and numbers. The sheer physical beauty of the pages." Diane is nurturing an almost abstract attraction to Martin that escapes Max's notice or perhaps simply fails to ignite his interest in the same way that the game does.

(For those of you playing along at home, Martin's edition of Einstein's theory must be the full-color facsimile published by George Braziller in 1996, since he can hardly have hold of the original manuscript. Incidentally, such an object is one of high Benjaminian ambivalence, replicating the original at a level of detail unimaginable before the advent of mechanical reproduction—in [End Page 160] this case, digital imaging and printing—in order to successfully fabricate the very aura of authenticity that Benjamin believed all mechanically reproduced artworks lacked.)

"Something happened then." We never find out what it is or who is responsible for it, but the effect is immediate and total: the electrical grid fails, screens go blank, the internet disappears. Jim and Tessa's plane begins to plummet from the sky. Jim sustains a head wound during the rough landing so they take a shuttle van to a clinic in Manhattan, where they squeeze in a quick fuck in the public bathroom before talking to the desk nurse. She gives them a sense of the scope of the disaster: "Everyone I've seen today has a story. You two are the plane crash. Others are the abandoned subway, the stalled elevators, then the empty office buildings, the barricaded storefronts." After Jim gets his wound looked at, the couple continues, as though under some entrancement, to the Super Bowl watch party, where Max—also in a kind of trance—is intermittently "broadcasting" the non-occurring football game. He supplies color commentary...

中文翻译：

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无处可走-唐·德洛（Don Delillo）的《沉默》

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 无处可走-唐·德洛（Don Delillo）的《沉默》
• 贾斯汀·泰勒（贾斯汀·泰勒）

1.在翻滚的空隙中

尽管本书篇幅短，但[推测]读者还是有足够的耐心和意志力的。

-爱因斯坦，相对论序言：特殊和一般理论（1916）

保险理赔人吉姆·克里普斯（Jim Kripps）和诗人妻子泰莎·贝伦斯（Tessa Berens）在飞机上。他们正从巴黎飞往纽约。吉姆在他的靠背屏幕上正在忙于跟踪飞行器。他向Tessa报告时间，高度和温度，Tessa试图记住“摄氏先生”的名字，而不求助于手机。起初，她认为她将无法管理它，但是后来她做到了。“她感到很满足。无所不在。几乎没有任何余地。” [完第159页]

吉姆（Jim）和泰莎（Tessa）将降落在纽瓦克（Newark），在那里他们计划直接乘出租车去他们的朋友马克斯·斯滕纳（Max Stenner）和黛安·卢卡斯（Diane Lucas）在上西城的公寓，共进晚餐并观看2022年超级碗。马克斯在这场比赛上大赌注。“让冲动决定逻辑“这是他赌徒的信条。（我也认为这也是DeLillo的信条。）马克斯从来没有向任何人透露他的赌注的细节或赌注。聚会的另一位客人马丁·德克尔（Martin Dekker）是戴安娜（Diane）的前学生。退休的物理学教授，马丁现在是布朗克斯特许中学的物理学老师，顺带一提：“过去一年，黛安一直在告诉年轻人回到地球。”这是什么意思？很难说。马丁对爱因斯坦抱有极大的兴趣。他宣称：“无论理论家披露，预测或想象的是什么，我都坚持爱因斯坦。他说过，然后我们看到了。比我们的太阳大数十亿倍。他几十年前说过。他的宇宙变成了我们的。”

爱因斯坦1912年的狭义相对论手稿对马丁特别感兴趣。沃尔特·本杰明（Walter Benjamin）曾将它的记载性和人类痕迹称为光环。“我们可以看到他的想法，”马丁因爱因斯坦使用的墨水，其边缘和划痕而激动不已，“他的笔迹，公式，字母和数字。页面的纯粹物理美感。” 黛安（Diane）对马丁的养育几乎是一种抽象的吸引力，从而使他逃脱了麦克斯的注意，或者根本就没有像游戏一样激发他的兴趣。

（对于那些在家中玩耍的人，马丁的爱因斯坦理论版一定是乔治·巴西勒（George Braziller）在1996年出版的全彩色传真，因为他几乎无法掌握原始手稿。顺便说一句，这样的物体是本杰明主义者的本色之一。矛盾性，在机械复制出现之前以无法想象的细节水平复制原件（在本示例中为[第160页]，数字成像和印刷），以便成功地制造出本杰明认为所有机械复制艺术品都缺乏的真实性气氛）

“那时发生了什么事。” 我们从不知道它是什么或由谁负责，但其影响是直接而全面的：电网故障，屏幕变黑，互联网消失。吉姆和泰莎的飞机开始从天空坠落。吉姆在崎landing不平的着陆过程中头部受伤，因此他们乘坐穿梭货车前往曼哈顿的一家诊所，在那里他们与公共护士交谈之前在公共浴室里快速做爱。她让他们了解了这场灾难的严重程度：“我今天看到的每个人都有一个故事。你们两个是飞机失事。其他人是废弃的地铁，停滞的电梯，然后是空荡荡的办公大楼，路障的店面。 ” 吉姆看完伤口后，这对夫妇继续参加超级碗观看晚会，就好像在某个入口下一样。在这种情况下，麦克斯（也有些发呆）会间歇性地“广播”不发生的足球比赛。他提供色彩评论...