Excerpt from Novel: War In A Beautiful Country

Angela was always surprised that scientists pushed the idea that humans were intelligent and adaptable.

After years of watching what people do, she thought: it’s not entirely true; we are poorly equipped for life. We really don’t know how to be in it well. She had come to believe that life was not the natural element of human beings; that while we believed we were designed to be conquerors of the earth and soon the cosmos, the truth was our bodies could not withstand even the easy laws of nature and our brains struggled with the simplest logic.
Some questions seem just too big for humans to handle. But the one question we seem to be able to answer is how to bring about our own demise and all that’s around us. No wonder we don’t like it here, if you go by all the unhappy people.

Ancient liturgies call life, “a valley of tears.”

Angela preferred to think of it as war in a beautiful country.