Reflecting On Rand
Ian Hamet has posted fascinatingly about today’s hundredth anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth. It sounds like he has read more of her than I have. At least, I haven’t read The Romantic Manifesto, though I believe I eventually got my hands on a copy. I agree with much of what he says, and I, too, fall short of agreeing with her completely. Some of the fanatics struck me the same way, clubby - I’d probably use the word cliquish - if not downright cult-like.
I never went through that phase of hating her as he did. My introduction was through seeing her mentioned many other places. Someone wrote a work - I don’t remember if it was an article or longer, or where it was published - titled It Usually Starts With Ayn Rand. For me it started with Robert Ringer, if I recall correctly, and rapidly moved to Rand.
I had read The Fountainhead first, I forget when. In the fall of 1981 I read 1984. That gave me nightmares, something I was never prone to having before then, and helped tip me into a months long bout of depression. What brought me out of that was reading Atlas Shrugged, even though I couldn’t get all the way through “the speech” until a later reading. I’d absorbed an extrapolated enough to know what the speech was all about anyway, and didn’t need the repeated beatings with a cast iron clue bat it represented.
I found We The Living especially depressing, but a good book, clearly formative and different from the others. I pick on public schools, but my late cousin Wendy say We The Living in my collection, got all excited because she had read it in high school, and borrowed it to read again. How amazing! A public high school in relatively northern Maine was assigning Ayn Rand as reading as little as about 20 years ago. Not bad, showing what communism wrought.
I went through a phase of collecting any of her books I could find, and even reading some of them. One of the clearest indicators of why Rand was needed is represented by one store clerk’s reaction to my asking for The Virtue of Selfishness. Understandable, given the common definition and connotation imbued into the word, but silly in that it’s ultimately what we’re all about, what makes us tick and keeps us alive.
Anyway, go read Ian’s post. It’s better than mine.
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