Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 218

others among technological enthusiasts, the religious nature of The Cloud
of Unknowing appears to be less problematic than its epistemology or way
of knowing by unknowing.
Nevertheless, the revival in the topic's popularity and the interest
in a range of religious and nonreligious meditation practices suggest
that even its epistemology is not so far off the radar of contemporary
thinking. The 2009 translation from the Middle English, with a long
introductory essay in the edition used for this topic, suggests that there
is continuing interest in the work. A 1973 edition beneited from the rise
of the 1960s counterculture and especially its interest in alternative ways
of knowing, a point to which its introduction by the renowned religious
scholar Huston Smith alludes. One of the most important novelists of
our time, Don DeLillo, makes use of The Cloud of Unknowing in two
of his best-known works. In 1985's White Noise , which traces the spread
of a toxic cloud, he alludes to a child as “a cloud of unknowing” (290).
Because children do not know death, they are open to more of the world
than adults, who presumably see in life its inevitable demise. In the face
of the inexplicable impact the “airborne toxic event” has brought to
sunsets, people are reduced to a sublime feeling of childlike unknowing:
“There is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but
we don't know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don't
know what we are watching or what it means, we don't know whether
it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust,
into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some
atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass” (324-325). The sunset vision,
brought about by technology run amok, brings a strange serenity, despite
“men in Mylex suits . . . gathering their terrible data.” DeLillo goes on,
“No one plays a radio or speaks in a voice that is much above a whisper.
Something golden falls, a softness delivered to the air” (325). More
importantly, in his widely recognized masterpiece, 1998's Underworld ,
DeLillo uses the fourteenth-century book as the title and leitmotif for
one of the six parts of his epic novel, having the main character Nick
Shay describe its contents in the midst of lovemaking with a woman he
has recently met. No amount of knowledge, Shay maintains, can com-
prehend the negation we call God. It is only by engaging in our own
forms of unknowing that this begins to be possible. There are numerous
other references from cultural icons, including Somerset Maugham ( The