The whole human story is comprehensible only through what is currently known, because of its cumulative nature.
Angus McGillicudy is unaware that he is a descendant of Eoghan MacMurrough, the fifth century Irish king about whom William Butler Yeats once wrote, a few days before his own death “There in the tomb, drops the faint moonlight/ But wind comes from the shore:/ they shake when the winds roar,/ Old bones upon the mountain shake.” That doesn’t really matter. Most people in Ireland are. He doesn’t know either, that Shannon, Jarvis, and Jarvis’ date, who is making excuses before the 15 minute mark, are all descended from Charlemagne, and that matters even less.
Ronald Hayes is unaware that he was the only person, in this country or any other, who is not descended from anyone the least bit famous, and that really was the cause of all of his problems, so that might actually matter.
A bigger problem, if you can believe it, is that the ghost of Odysseus is wandering the countryside collecting souls to man his Final Voyage. There had been sightings.
A columnist named Sarah Grainne had written that an elderly woman, dying the slow, expensive modern way in a Boston hospital room, had been visited by a rakish ghost who, reportedly, had smiled in a disturbingly erotic manner, taken her hand, and said.
“Look at it this way. If you don’t come with me, you’ll be dead in a week. If you’re lucky. And then, there’ll be nothing. I mean nothing, nothing. But if you come with me, not only is there excitement and adventure in your very immediate future but you, my dear, will be young and beautiful again. These are the only things worth being.”
His teeth, again reportedly, were incredibly white when he smiled.
This elderly woman then pointed out that if there were nothing on the other side, she wouldn’t be receiving visitors from the spirit dimension at all, i.e., right now, from him, so she wasn’t sure she could trust him in any direction, at all.
“Baby doll,” he had said, “you call this unliving?”