Things, boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content (6).
Jack is "wary" here of the awareness that these "things" are a pale substitute both for life and for the hope which once flowed from more traditional values. The postmodernist world depicted in DeLillo's novel is one in which God and all spiritual hope have disappeared for all intents and purposes, replaced by "things" of the consumerist culture, things which have been invested with the hope previously granted to the world of God and religion. "Things" are objects of worship, whether the consumers know it or not. The consumers believe, consciously or not, that these things not only will give meaning to their otherwise largely meaningless lives, but also will somehow save them from death itself, as once religion was believed to be able to do. However, as Jack senses, these things of the religion of consumerism are not deliverers of light or lightness, as promised in commercials, but rather are bringers of darkness and heaviness. To worship a thing which is dead, which has no life and which can bring no life, is fetishism, is to worship death itself, which Jack realizes on some level. However, at the same time he realizes it, he is unable to free himself from it himself. He observes it more clearly than others, but he is like others in his imprisonment in the same materialistic, consumerist culture.
One image does give Jack something of a sense of the religious, which otherwise is generally absent entirely from his life. That image is an image of innocence, the innocence of his sleeping children:
I wanted to be near the children, watch them sleep. Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I can come to God. If there is a secular equ...