![]() ![]() Meaning, Garrett had perhaps ruined her life. On her deathbed, in a moment of weakness, Catherine tells her husband that maybe her father was right about him. Garrett is also tormented by grief and shame at the death of his wife, Catherine, a woman of deep Catholic faith. ![]() And if the future ends in nothingness, what sort of meaning can this life offer? Theo Hape (more on him later), “Why is there something rather than nothing?” For if there was once nothing, there might be nothing again. As a twelve year old boy, he stands up in an auditorium of people and asks the notorious Fr. He is tormented by existence, by the question of why there is anything at all. Garrett Yourrick is plagued both by a brilliant mind and the question of nothingness. But Garrett is born due to his wife’s “accident” (she is raped), and Grandpa Gene therefore learns “how pathetic I am in ways that, had I been childless, I’d never ever have noticed.” Pathetic, because he does not show his son any true love or affection. ![]() Grandpa Yourrick, a savant computing whiz lacking interpersonal skills, decides with his wife to have no children. Like Broch before him, Hren asks: what happens when the Old World values have been discarded? When God Himself has been abandoned? What, if anything, gives life meaning? What, if anything, gives ethical direction to one’s life? They can be read as a twenty-first century analogue to Herman Broch’s three generation masterpiece, The Sleepwalkers. To be or not to be, that is the question.Įach male Yourrick grapples deeply not only with the meaning of human existence, but with existence itself. The name Yourrick (i.e., “Yorick,” Shakespeare’s “fellow of infinite jest” from Hamlet) ought to give a hint of what Hren is up to. Hren meditates on this question at length through three generations of male Yourricks: Grandpa Gene Yourrick, Father Garrett Yourrick, and Son Blake Yourrick. We might ask ourselves, is life a gift to be handed on? Or an incomprehensible calamity to be avoided? Real or imagined, the general consensus is that the world is getting worse. But now? Twenty percent of the way through the twenty-first century, something seems to have gone wrong. Americans were “winners” of WWII, fat, prosperous, and content. Americans in the 50s would have perhaps scratched their heads at Marcel. I was reminded of Marcel’s words recently reading Joshua Hren’s new novel Infinite Regress. A century that began with unfettered promise was, only fifty years later, littered with millions of corpses.īut Marcel cautioned that this view could only end in despair, for if life is not a gift, but a burden, then how “could death appear as anything else than the flinging on the scrap heap of a being that has ceased to be of service-and that no longer is anything, the moment it is no longer of any use?” ![]() Writing in the early 1950’s in Man Against Mass Society, philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel proclaimed, “If we want to understand the kind of crisis which has overtaken the relationship between the older and the younger generation, we have to take note of the fact that life is being less and less felt as a gift to be handed on, and more and more felt as a kind of incomprehensible calamity, like a flood, against which we ought to build dykes.” Such a view-from a Frenchman no less-was perhaps understandable considering Europe’s experience of the first half of the twentieth century. ![]()
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