Daniel Kearns didn’t believe he had much control over outcomes. Life came at him rapidly, inexplicably, and reacting was what mattered. The universe was a vague, dumb expression of indifference and he wasn’t the center of anything. This outlook was partly the influence of his father, who exhibited a Depression-era, knock-around humility now absent in the culture. But there was also his long, drawn-out ancestral inheritance, a French-Irish melancholia born in the hedgerows of Normandy. They said his people had been French Huguenots centuries earlier. The Catholics had reviled them, so they’d fled to Ireland, where they eventually became Catholic there anyway. It didn’t make any sense to him, but somehow the feeling of being lost, misplaced, had its origins in this generational saga, and he would have accepted this fate if he hadn’t thought so much about love and war.
Continue reading