AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

This void has been the subject of art. David Lynch's shots of driving at night down a road in the middle of nowhere, with the headlights picking out a tiny spot that just accentuates the vast darkness surrounding everything. Or Moby Dick , his whiteness a symbol of the vast void blankness of the universe. Also a central idea in White Noise.

This is one of those portentiously metaphysical novels (or maybe pretentious, if that's not to your taste). It makes clear references to other literary works that seem to take on as their subject the basic metaphysical structure of the world, including Moby Dick and Paradise Lost. The judge is a verbose and articulate spokesman for a pitiless nihilism:

Or take Moby Dick, where the whiteness of the whale becomes a symbol of the universe’s terrifying emptiness—pure, blank, indifferent. A similar void haunts White Noise, a world where meaning is always slipping through one’s fingers, consumed by static.

pf apologetically reactionay esthetics. Formalism over social realism. I cite Moby Dick

This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark